Background
Lodge, Rupert Clendon was born in 1886 in Manchester.
Lodge, Rupert Clendon was born in 1886 in Manchester.
Oxford, Marburg and Berlin. Infts: A. W. Wright.
Taught at the Universities of Minnesota and Alberta before being appointed Professor of Logic and the History of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba in 1920. Shared the headship of the department with A. W. Wright until 1934 when he became sole head, a post he retained until his retirement in 1947. Subsequently taught at Queen’s University, Kingston, and at Long Island University.
President of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1926.
Lodge was a pioneer in the development of the notion of 'applied philosophy’, and his work on Plato and Locke was highly regarded. But his central claim to originality is his theory about the nature of philosophy. He believed that idealist, realist and pragmatist theories represented natural responses to the ambiguities and complex* ities of the human condition and that none could be disposed of. Rather, the serious philosopher should seek to work out the most plausible responses to each problem in terms of all three theories. Pluralism became his main interest. H,s belief that philosophy was irreducibly pluralistic stemmed in part from his experiences in Manito ba, where the complex relations of many cultures and the successive waves of poor immigrants suggested to him that pluralism was inevitable and that, although temperament and culture inclined individuals to one philosophy or another, their partisans had to come to terms with the fact that there will always be representatives of all three philosophies. Each approach, he argued, has teal political consequences and influences many acets of life including theories of education and he practice of business. Lodge wrote a series of °°ks working out problems in these terms. Although he converted few professional philosophers, he exerted a real influence on Canadian Political life and on educational theory in the SA as we|| as ¡n cana(ja Fie admired the Philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet but he was influenced by disciples of John Dewey, especially A W. Wright, his colleague in Manitoba. Plato was a life-interest and, in terms of his Scholarly writing, a dominating interest, but he Was stireed not so much by Plato’s technical achievements as by his insistence on making Philosophy relevant to the day-to-day affairs of life. Armour and Trott( 1981) argue that Lodgeisa S|gnificant source of the ‘philosophical federalism which has been central to Canadian political ' l0ught over the past several decades.