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Scott Milross Buchanan was an American philosopher, author, and educator. He is best known as the founder of the Great Books program at St. John's College, at Annapolis, Maryland.
Background
Scott Milross Buchanan was born on March 17, 1895 in Sprague, Wash. , the only child of William Duncan Buchanan, a country doctor, and Lillian Elizabeth Bagg. Raised in Jeffersonville, Vermont, he was much involved in the town's Congregational church, which his father helped to found.
Education
Buchanan attended high schools in Worcester and Pittsfield, Massachussets After his graduation in 1912, he entered Amherst College, where he majored in mathematics and Greek and excelled at long-distance running. Buchanan took his B. A. at Amherst in 1916.
Having won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1917, Buchanan went to England from 1919 to 1921 to study philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford University. Owing to his mother's illness, Buchanan returned to the United States sooner than expected and was unable to complete an Oxford degree.
For a year and a half, Buchanan taught high school at Amherst, but, determined to obtain a doctorate in philosophy, he entered Harvard University as a graduate student in 1922. He received his Ph. D. in 1925.
Career
Scott Buchanan stayed on at the Amherst College for two additional years, serving as secretary of the Christian Association from 1916 to 1917 and as an instructor in Greek from 1917 to 1918.
Although his religious persuasion made him a pacifist and a conscientious objector, he nevertheless entered the United States Navy in June 1918; he was discharged as an ensign six months later.
While working on his Ph. D. at the Harvard University, which he received in 1925, Buchanan taught as an assistant in Harvard's philosophy department from 1922 to 1924 and then for a year as an instructor in philosophy at the College of the City of New York. Buchanan's doctoral dissertation, a study of the philosophical question of possibility, became his first book. Possibility (1927) explores "three kinds of possibility--imaginative, scientific, and absolute. " This well-received study was described by John Dewey as "a first-class piece of much-needed intellectual work. "
Meanwhile, Buchanan had become assistant director of the People's Institute in New York City, and in this position, which he occupied from 1925 until 1929, Buchanan worked with the director, Everett Dean Martin, to implement educational programs for adults. These programs--many of them held in branches of the New York Public Library--included an emphasis on the "Great Books" as they were studied in the newly established general honors course at Columbia University.
During this period, Buchanan intensified his lifelong commitment to approaches that break down conventional boundaries between the intellectual disciplines. One result was Poetry and Mathematics (1929), in which he suggested that "mathematics is often poetry, " while poetry can become mathematical by "joining words and images into a world of hard persuasive fact. "
In 1929, Buchanan became associate professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia and, the following year, professor. He then studied in England for a year and, stimulated by the work of George and Mary Boole, explored the advances made by a group of Cambridge mathematicians who called themselves the Analytic Society.
One result of his stay was Symbolic Distance in Relation to Analogy and Fiction (1932), which analyzes how the intellectual arts are essentially concerned with symbols. Buchanan remained at the University of Virginia until 1936. Then Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, invited him and Stringfellow Barr, Buchanan's longtime friend, fellow Rhodes Scholar, and colleague at the University of Virginia, to join the Chicago faculty. As chairman of the Committee on the Liberal Arts, Buchanan played a major part in organizing the university's Great Books program. When Barr became president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1937, Buchanan joined him as dean.
Buchanan's leadership was instrumental in transforming the nearly moribund college into a vigorous intellectual center whose curriculum was based on a Great Books program in which students and faculty together studied about 120 classics in virtually all of the academic disciplines. Concurrently, Buchanan's writings continued to reflect his interdisciplinary concerns.
After considerable study at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, he published The Doctrine of Signatures: A Defense of Theory in Medicine (1938). This study in the philosophy of medicine appraised the relations between medicine and modern scientific theory and also the place of philosophy in the thought of Hippocrates and Galen. Buchanan left the St. John's deanship in 1947 and served until 1949 as director of Liberal Arts, Inc. , in Pittsfield, Massachussets His consistent passion for the philosophy of Plato and for the Socratic method of inquiry in particular was made evident to a wide audience when he wrote the introduction to, and edited, The Portable Plato (1948), a very successful volume in the Viking Portable series. From 1948 to 1958, Buchanan's political orientation led him to be a consultant, trustee, and secretary of the Foundation for World Government.
During this period, he published Essay in Politics (1953), which stressed the need to evaluate how large institutions, such as corporations, negatively affect the perception that the republican form of government depends on the consent of the governed. After spending the 1956-1957 academic year as professor of philosophy and chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, Buchanan was reunited with Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the Fund for the Republic. Hutchins invited him to help direct the fund's project to clarify how a free society could best be preserved in the United States.
In that capacity, which took him to Santa Barbara, California, Buchanan became one of the founders of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, where he was a senior fellow until his death. Buchanan left unpublished a manuscript entitled Truth in the Sciences, which he had written in 1950.
During his college years, Buchanan distanced himself from the church but remained "pretty deeply Christian" throughout his life.
Views
Buchanan's own program differed from generally empiricist, positivist, or pragmatist movements by stressing what he saw as the need for reforms in the mathematical symbolism employed in modern science. Buchanan's first book, published in 1927, stated that science is "the greatest body of uncriticized dogma we have today" and even likened science to the "Black Arts". For the rest of his career, Buchanan pondered ways to mitigate the variety of threats to humanity that he perceived in the unmanaged and unsupervised growth of modern science and technology.
Quotations:
As he introduced the book (it appeared posthumously in 1972), Buchanan aptly summed up his philosophical investigations by professing that "I am not aware of deliberate membership in any school of philosophy, but. I am by will, and now by confirmed habit, a teacher of the Socratic persuasion. "
Interests
Politicians
During his undergraduate years, Buchanan became personally close to Amherst's president Alexander Meiklejohn and was strongly influenced by Meiklejohn's ideas about educational reform.
Connections
On February 5, 1921, Buchanan married Miriam Damon Thomas, a teacher and social-welfare worker; they had one child.