Background
He was born on July 3, 1876 in Poultney, Vermont, United States, the son of George Adelbert Perry and Susannah Chase Barton, both of whom were teachers.
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He was born on July 3, 1876 in Poultney, Vermont, United States, the son of George Adelbert Perry and Susannah Chase Barton, both of whom were teachers.
After attending the Franklin School in Philadelphia, he entered Princeton, from which he received the B. A. in 1896. Although he intended to study for the ministry, Perry decided first to pursue philosophy for a year at Harvard. That choice was decisive, for it led him to become one of the foremost philosophers of his generation. At the turn of the century, philosophy was in its heyday at Harvard. Teachers such as Josiah Royce, William James, and George Santayana greatly influenced Perry. He completed his M. A. and Ph. D. degrees in 1897 and 1899.
After brief stints as an instructor at Williams (1899 - 1900) and Smith (1900 - 1902) colleges, Perry returned to Harvard to teach philosophy in 1902. Perry taught at Harvard for more than forty years, holding the Edgar Pierce professorship after 1930. He retired in 1946.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Perry's years at Harvard were filled with civic concerns and wide-ranging philosophical activities. During World War I he was a major in the army and served as executive secretary of the War Department Committee on Education and Special Training (1918 - 1919). In 1920 he was elected president of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association. In 1921-1922 he was Hyde lecturer in France.
The James family gave Perry access to William James's unpublished papers in 1930. That opportunity resulted in Perry's two-volume The Thought and Character of William James (1935).
With the outbreak of World War II, Perry became chairman (1940 - 1945) of the Committee of American Defense, Harvard Group, and in 1942-1945 he was chairman of the Universities' Committee on Postwar International Problems. He vigorously encouraged the formation and development of the United Nations. In the academic years 1946-1947 and 1947-1948, Perry gave the Gifford lectures at the University of Glasgow; they became the basis for his Realms of Value (1954).
Questions in ethics concerned Perry even more than those in epistemology. His General Theory of Value remains a major American statement of a naturalistic theory of ethical judgment. One of his first books, The Approach to Philosophy (1905), emphasized Perry's "great desire that philosophy should appear in its vital relations to more familiar experiences. "
Perry died in Cambridge, Massachussets.
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Perry held strong political convictions. He supported the New Deal; and early on, he warned against the threat that Hitler and Nazism posed to world peace.
Perry rebelled against a fundamental assumption of idealism: that being depends on knowing. Banding together with William P. Montague, Edwin Bissell Holt, W. T. Marvin, Walter B. Pitkin, and Edward G. Spaulding, Perry became one of the "New Realists, " a group dedicated to establishing an alternative theory of knowledge. His first writings, often polemical in character, reaffirmed versions of the commonsense belief that although the reality and structure of the world are knowable, they are by no means totally dependent on mind. In support of this "new realism, " Perry appealed for greater logical rigor, more precise use of language, and extensive employment of the methods and results of science.
Rooted in the psychology and pragmatism of William James, Perry's theory of value rested upon a now well-known principle: "Any object, whatever it be, acquires value when any interest, whatever it be, is taken in it. " Value has an irreducibly subjective component. Perry went on to argue that normative judgments may, and must, be made in order to facilitate communal organization of interests. With a concern for human civilization and progress reminiscent of some of Santayana's writing, he held that one can adjudicate value disputes by using "the norm of harmonious happiness. " This norm, elaborated in Realms of Value, assumes that conflict and its resolution are the points of departure for morality. Harmonious happiness can, and should, attract allegiance as an ideal because "it embraces all interests, is to some extent to everybody's interest, and thereby obtains a breadth of support exceeding that of any other good. Every person has some stake in it. " To underwrite such a norm, Perry urged, men and women must strive for moral education, democracy, and world unity.
Whether his topic was "the ego-centric predicament" or "one world in the making, " Perry believed that philosophy could make harmony and inclusiveness of interests more familiar and conflict among interests less so. From start to finish, his epistemological, moral, and social thought stayed true to that interest.
On August 15, 1905, he married Rachel Berenson; they had two sons.