BRIGHTMAN, EDGAR SHEFFIELD
(1884–1953)

Edgar Sheffield Brightman was the leading American advocate of personalism. At Boston University he studied under Borden Parker Bowne, the first philosopher in America to develop the personalistic position. Brightman taught at Nebraska Wesleyan University (1912–1915), Wesleyan University (1915–1919), and from 1919 at Boston University, occupying the chair of Borden Parker Bowne professor of philosophy from 1925 until his death. He was president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1936.

Brightman conceived of personalism as a mediating position in philosophy. As such, it for him superseded William James's pragmatism and Josiah Royce's absolute idealism, to each of which, in turn, he had been attracted early in his career. Brightman also held that personalism could resolve the impasse between supernaturalism and naturalism. Furthermore, although he criticized positivism for being too restricted an empiricism and although he eschewed much in existentialism, Brightman's personalism can be understood as an attempt to combine the surface experience (sense) of positivism and the depth dimension (value) of existentialism in a concept of the total person.

Epistemology

Brightman held firmly to an epistemic dualism of the "shining present" (immediate experience) and "the illuminating absent" (the referent). Constantly emphasizing that all primary data were present experiences, he advocated a radically empirical method; that is, a method that considers whatever is, at any time, present in consciousness. Since knowledge involves reference, it is always hypothetical and tentative. Brightman accepted this as a healthy probabilism (and not a destructive skepticism), because he found in the principle of coherence an adequate test of reference (or criterion of truth). Deeply influenced by Hegelian dialectic, he viewed coherence not as formal consistency but as a principle for interpreting experience: a statement or a set of statements is true to the extent that it organizes and orders experience.

Ontology

The metaphysical perspective that emerges is a pluralistic idealism. Reality is a society of persons: the ultimate (uncreated) Person and finite (created) persons. Reality is thus not nature but history. The natural order does not have ontological identity "outside" the ultimate Person; rather, this order is his "behavior." The laws of logic do not have privileged priority; they are constitutive of the supreme mind. In philosophy of religion, this position is idealistic theism (not theological dualism). God is a conscious Person who creates finite persons and cooperates with them in the cosmic endeavor. A human person is a context of experience capable of self-consciousness, reason, and ideal values.

Evil

Brightman is probably most widely known for his controversial treatment of the problem of evil. He argued that the power of God is limited by nonrational conditions (the Given) within the divine nature that God's will neither created nor approves. God maintains constant and growing, though never complete, control of the Given.

See also Bowne, Borden Parker; Evil, The Problem of; James, William; Personalism; Royce, Josiah.

Bibliography

Brightman's chief works are Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1925; revised editions, 1951 and 1963, the latter edited by Robert N. Beck); The Problem of God (New York: Abingdon Press, 1930); The Finding of God (New York: Abingdon Press, 1931); Moral Laws (New York: Abingdon Press, 1933); A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940); Nature and Values (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1945); Person and Reality (edited by Peter A. Bertocci in collaboration with Jannette E. Newhall and Robert S. Brightman [New York: Ronald Press, 1958]). A selected bibliography of his philosophical writings, including some 200 monographs and articles in addition to books, may be found in Person and Reality, pp. 367–370, or in the Brightman Memorial issue of Philosophical Forum 12 (1954): 22–28.

For references to discussions of Brightman's influence, see Peter A. Bertocci, "Edgar S. Brightman—Ten Years Later," in Philosophical Forum 20 (1962/1963): 3–10.

John H. Lavely (1967)