Region Western Philosophy Influenced Alexandre Koyre | Role Philosopher Name Edwin Burtt | |
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Era 20th-century philosophy Books The metaphysical foundatio, The teachings of the co, The Metaphysical Foundati, Light - Love and Life, Newton's Metaphysics and the P Similar People Alexandre Koyre, John Dewey, Giovanni Gentile, Edmund Husserl, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | ||
Schools of thought Young radicals | ||
Edwin Arthur Burtt (; October 11, 1892 – September 6, 1989), usually cited as E. A. Burtt, was an American philosopher who wrote extensively on the philosophy of religion. His doctoral thesis published as a book under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science has had a significant influence upon the history of science that is not generally recognized, according to H. Floris Cohen.
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Biography
He was born on October 11, 1892 in Groton, Massachusetts. His missionary parents took Burtt to China for several of his teenage years. He was educated at Yale University. He graduated from Yale in 1915, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He attended Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He became the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University in 1941.
He died on September 6, 1989 in Ithaca, New York.
Work
Though he maintained throughout his life a sympathy towards religious values and beliefs, he acknowledged that his philosophy had been marked by a reaction towards what he saw as his own father's too narrow an outlook. Although Burtt participated in drafting the Humanist Manifesto I, he did not work on the project further, because he lost interest after his ideas that spiritual experience is the identification with categories of space, time, causality, and other fundamental physical principles were never included in the final publications. However, in 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.
Legacy
Based on his own statements, Thomas Kuhn may very well have been unaware that in building on the philosophy of Alexandre Koyré, he was in turn building on the philosophy of Burtt whose influence upon Koyré has been demonstrated as substantial.