Conclusion

Abstract

Conflict and reconciliation played a role in Burtt’s personal life as well as in his later philosophy. It influenced his decision to retire from college teaching in 1960 at the age of sixty-seven. Withdrawing from academia into the Quaker community in Ithaca, Burtt continued to write well into his nineties. His reputation among professional philosophers was diminished by a constellation of factors of no substantive consequence. One of them was the fact that he did not have much stomach for the aggressive nip-and-tuck, which has defined philosophy in America since the 1930s. Another reason Burtt’s philosophy has suffered neglect is that he lived too modestly, and for too long. He made no attempt to stake a claim for his thought in posterity and given the fact that he was alive and well, no one made such a claim for him.