Background
Broad, Charlie Dunbar was born in 1887 in Harlesden, Middlesex.
Cambridge empirical philosopher
Broad, Charlie Dunbar was born in 1887 in Harlesden, Middlesex.
Manuscripts and Archives, LittD. Trinity College, Cambridge.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1911-1917 and 1923-1971. Assistant to Professor, University of St Andrews, 1911-1914. Lecturer, Dundee. 1914-1920.
Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 1920-1923. Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 1926-1933, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy. 1933-1953.
Schilpp. P. A. (1959) The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, New York: Tudor. Broad's philosophical writings deserve interest as much for their approach as for their contents or conclusions. They display the merits and disadvantages of what might be seen as reasoned academic common sense: the impartial statement of considerations for and against a set of theories on the topic in hand, a weighing of arguments, a judicious conclusion. He applied this approach painstakingly to scientific method, to ethical theories, to theories of perception and to philosophical methodology. The conclusions he reached arc seldom compelling, but his ways of reaching them often contain useful resumes of past arguments. He now seems unusual in the history of philosophy as a Fellow of Trinity College throughout the active life of Wittgenstein in Cambridge, and for much of the life of Moore, yet as having no part in the development of analytical philosophy. His own attitudes towards philosophical methods were stated as carefully as his other views (for example in ‘Critical and speculative philosophy’, in J. H. Muirhead Contemporary British Philosophy, First Series, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924). Broad’s understanding of the Cambridge tradition, including his own distant view of Wittgenstein, appeared in his essay ‘The local historical background of contemporary Cambridge philosophy’ (in C. A. Mace, British Philosophy in the MidCentury, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957, itself a valuable source of comment on the period). Broad wrote that his Examination of McTaggart was ‘about the best work' of which he was capable. It typifies his approach in its thoroughness and patience, as well as in its scrupulous fairness towards a philosopher whom Broad admired but whose views he did not share inany way. Hisworkson Kant and Leibniz were equally meticulous. Among philosophers of his background he was exceptional in his long interest in psychical research, the more so since this does not seem to have been based on any particular personal convictions or preconceptions.