Charles D. Broad Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Overview
Charles Dunbar Broad (1887, 1971) was a British philosopher whose careful analytic style and unusually wide range of interests made him one of the central figures of twentieth-century philosophy in the United Kingdom. Working largely at the University of Cambridge, he produced influential books and essays on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of science, and he became well known for scrupulous overviews that mapped the logical space of positions before entering the fray. His writings such as Scientific Thought, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, Five Types of Ethical Theory, and his two-volume Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy became staples for students and scholars who valued lucid exposition joined to rigorous argument. He was also distinctive among leading analytic philosophers for sustained, disciplined engagement with psychical research, a topic he approached with scientific caution rather than advocacy.

Early Life and Education
Broad was born in 1887 in England and gravitated early toward the exacting standards of Cambridge philosophy. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he first developed a taste for technical clarity that would become his signature. He shifted from an initial focus on the mathematical and scientific side to the Moral Sciences, where he studied figures such as G. E. Moore, J. M. E. McTaggart, and the logician W. E. Johnson. Their influence is visible in Broad's determination to distinguish positions with precision before evaluating them, and in his sustained attention to the metaphysical and logical underpinnings of everyday concepts. He encountered the work of Bertrand Russell during this period and absorbed the virtues of analysis without adopting Russell's more sweeping programmatic ambitions.

Academic Career
After early teaching posts, including a period in Scotland, Broad returned to Cambridge in the 1920s, becoming a Fellow of Trinity College. He rose to occupy the Knightbridge Professorship of Moral Philosophy, a chair associated with the Cambridge tradition of Sidgwick and Moore. In this role he was a prominent presence in the university's philosophical life, working alongside Moore and, later, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He also interacted with younger colleagues and visitors such as Frank P. Ramsey and R. B. Braithwaite, whose interests in probability and the philosophy of science intersected fruitfully with Broad's own concerns. Broad's steady, institution-shaping contributions extended to service in college and university offices and to editorial and learned-society work that helped guide the direction of British philosophy between the wars and after.

Major Works and Themes
Scientific Thought (1923) showcased Broad's ability to synopsize the then-current state of physics and its philosophical implications, especially the shifting conceptions of space, time, and causation. He brought the new science into conversation with traditional metaphysical questions, insisting that philosophical interpretation keep pace with empirical discovery without surrendering to fashion.

The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925) offered a still-classic taxonomy of theories about the relation between mind and body. Broad carefully laid out varieties of materialism, dualism, spiritualism, and neutral monism, and gave special attention to emergentism, the idea that genuinely novel properties can arise at higher levels of organization. He did not treat emergentism as a doctrine to be embraced come what may, but as a rigorously articulated option that could be appraised against evidence and argument. The book also contains detailed analyses of perception, memory, and introspection, framed within a broadly critical-realist outlook that engaged debates then dominated by sense-data theories.

In Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930), Broad reconstructed and assessed central options in moral philosophy by presenting them in their strongest forms. His treatment emphasized fairness to historical figures and traditions, and it supplied generations of students with a blueprint for thinking about hedonism, utilitarianism, idealism, self-realization, and intuitionism without caricature.

Broad's two-volume Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (1933, 1938) stands as a model of philosophical scholarship. J. M. E. McTaggart had long been a presence in Cambridge metaphysics, and Broad combined sympathetic exposition with unflinching critique. The result is both a definitive commentary on McTaggart and an extended exercise in analytic metaphysics that clarified issues about time, substance, and the nature of reality.

Engagements and Influences
Broad's Cambridge milieu brought him into productive contact with Moore's ethical non-naturalism and methodological clarity, Russell's logical analysis, and Wittgenstein's distinctive approach to language and thought. While he did not join any single camp, he learned from each and insisted on the importance of argumentative transparency. His exchanges with Ramsey and Braithwaite on probability and induction reflected shared interests in how scientific reasoning works and what warrants belief. Broad's reviews and society papers frequently engaged the arguments of contemporaries such as Susan Stebbing, Gilbert Ryle, and A. J. Ayer, whose logical empiricism he regarded with both respect and reserve; he welcomed their stress on clarity while questioning narrow verificationist constraints.

Psychical Research
Broad took an unusual step among leading analytic philosophers by devoting serious attention to psychical research. He served in leadership roles in the Society for Psychical Research and approached questions about telepathy, precognition, and survival with exacting standards of evidence. His Lectures on Psychical Research distilled decades of reflection, articulating a methodological stance that separated conceptual possibility from evidential sufficiency. He engaged thoughtfully with figures such as H. H. Price and C. J. Ducasse, arguing that certain anomalous phenomena, if established, would have deep implications for the philosophy of mind and personal identity. Nevertheless, he emphasized caution: openness to evidence, but no relaxation of epistemic standards.

Style and Method
Broad was renowned for making the philosophical landscape explicit. He was not content to offer a single argument for a single view; rather, he enumerated the leading options, analyzed their commitments, and traced their implications. This taxonomic habit, inherited in part from Moore and Johnson, made his work invaluable for teaching and debate. His prose is patient and accessible, avoiding jargon and attending to examples. Even when he defended a position, he devoted generous space to rival views so that readers could see the genuine points of contention.

Public Roles and Recognition
Broad's stature in British philosophy is reflected in his presidency of the Aristotelian Society, the London-based organization that anchored much of the philosophical discussion in the English-speaking world between the wars. Through addresses and papers, he helped set agendas that bridged technical analysis and broader metaphysical questions. His service for the Society for Psychical Research, though controversial in some quarters, demonstrated a principled commitment to follow evidence wherever it might lead, while keeping philosophical and scientific standards intact.

Later Years and Legacy
Broad retired from the Knightbridge Professorship in the 1950s but continued to write and lecture. He remained a presence in Cambridge conversations, even as the philosophical scene shifted toward ordinary language approaches associated with Wittgenstein and, elsewhere, toward the logical empiricism of A. J. Ayer and the later analytic philosophy of Gilbert Ryle. Broad's own legacy endured in part because his works are exemplary of a tradition that prizes clarity, charity, and comprehensiveness. Philosophers of mind continue to revisit his analyses of emergence and mental causation; epistemologists point to his discussions of induction and evidence; ethicists still assign Five Types of Ethical Theory for its balanced presentation of the main moral outlooks.

He died in 1971, having spent most of his professional life at Cambridge. Those who knew his work valued its steadiness and its intellectual honesty. Standing between the generation of Russell and Moore and the later flowering of postwar analytic philosophy, Broad provided an indispensable link: a teacher of teachers, a cartographer of possibilities, and a critic whose fairness set a standard. His influence is visible in the Cambridge tradition he helped to shape, in the writings of colleagues such as Moore and Braithwaite, in the conversations sparked by Wittgenstein and Ramsey to which he contributed, and in the ongoing use of his books by students seeking a clear map through difficult terrain.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Charles, under the main topics: Truth - Deep - Science - Knowledge - Reason & Logic.