Bowne, Borden Parker

Bowne was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the American personalist school of philosophy. His position is theistic and idealistic, and finds in human persons the key to meaning in the world. Knowledge comes only through personal experience, through which we understand ourselves to be enduring thinking entities with a certain degree of freedom. The uniformity of God's activity is such as to make nature intelligible to us, but our minds are nevertheless independent of God's. Borden Parker Bowne was born in a New Jersey manse and educated at Pennington Seminary, New York University and in Europe (chiefly Paris, Halle and Göttingen). He taught at Boston University from 1876 to 1910, serving as the first dean of the graduate school. His views were strongly influenced by the ideas of Kant, Lotze (with whom he studied) and Bergson. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church as a local preacher in 1872 and an elder in 1882. During a long career of teaching and publishing he became the most influential exponent of American personalism, a philosophical school of which he was arguably the founder.