The Sane & Eccentric in Present Thought - Brand Blanshard (1963)

Brand Blanshard gives a talk at the American University in 1963 as part of the John Hurst Philosophy Lecture series. Blanshard’s talk is an elegy for the approach and tradition of British Idealism, representing a “principle of sanity” perhaps forever destroyed by the great wars. For Blanshard, this sanity was marked by a passion for rational order and intelligibility contingent on a rational system. His wide-ranging discussion addresses the demise of speculative metaphysics, manifestations of rational coherence in ethics and aesthetics, the swift revolution in western philosophy brought about by the rise of analytic and existentialist approaches, and the “new philosophy” of linguistic analysis. While the lecture is complex, Blanshard is a dynamic and engaging speaker who weaves philosophical argument together with historical analysis and broad engagement with contemporary art, literature and poetry. There is also a buried gem toward the end of the talk when Blanchard exhorts the audience to take interest in the work of a “German refugee” - Hannah Arendt, whose series on Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in The New Yorker in the weeks before Blanchard’s talk.
00:00 Talk
1:03:29 Questions
#Philosophy

[@rcnelson]

I named my first born after him. An impressive man in several ways and a model of clarity.

[@zaineridling]

Love this cat! Read all his books in college in the early 1980s.

[@lewreed1871]

This was fantastic.

[@PessimisticIdealism]

A wonderful lecture.

[@PessimisticIdealism]

1:01:52 Those closing lines are deeply moving.

[@JoseSanchez-zo5tb]

First Philosophy major!