The Realists Who Sharpened the Edges of Burtt’s Ideas

Abstract

It was Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge, Dean of the Faculties at Columbia (1912–1929), not John Dewey, who was Burtt’s doctoral thesis advisor. Sterling Lamprecht, one of Woodbridge’s students, later at Amherst, commented that Woodbridge’s teaching “was bound to generate metaphysical doctrines.”¹ However, the sorts of metaphysical thinking Woodbridge invited were “analytic in characterchwr(133)concerned with nature and man’s inclusion in it. Nothing about this metaphysics was of that transcendental import which current positivism has in mind when it rejects metaphysics.”² True to the British tradition from which he derived, Woodbridge brought empirical realism to his interest in Naturalism. As a metaphysician Woodbridge was not a skeptical sort. His own work in philosophy was the attempted expansion of Aristotle’s categories, prime matter and form, and to substitute for them “structure, behavior, and a natural theology of sequence.”³