Nature of Thought (Textbook Binding)

by Brand Blanshard (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Reissue from the classic Muirhead Library of Philosophy series (originally published between 1890s - 1970s). --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Textbook Binding
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (June 1964)
• ISBN-10: 0391009230
• ISBN-13: 978-0391009233
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,387,796 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars They just don't write 'em like that anymore, January 21, 1999

By	John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Silver Lake, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In this brilliant two-volume work, rationalist Brand Blanshard traces the development and immanent purpose of human thought from the beginnings of perception to its ultimate, transcendent end: the grasp of all reality as a tremendous whole, a vast system interconnected throughout by intelligible relations of necessity.

Not, of course, that he thinks we have _arrived_ at such an understanding, or indeed even that we ever will arrive at it. His concern here is to present this degree of understanding as an _ideal_, as the final goal at which thought implicitly aims to the extent that it deserves to be called thought at all. And his account of this implicit ideal throws its light on the development of human cognition from its very beginnings, just as knowledge of an oak throws light upon the nature of an acorn.

Blanshard was the most empirical of rationalists, having been driven to his rationalist position by a close examination of the realities of human thought; this work is the fruit of that examination. And because he stays close both to philosophy and to human psychology, his work can be profitably read by those in either camp.

And it should be read. Great philosophical treatises are all too seldom written, and this is one of the twentieth century's greatest. Nothing since has matched it in either scope or rigor.