Flewelling, Ralph Tyler

Flewelling, Ralph Tyler 

Born Nov. 23, 1871; died Mar. 31, 1960. American personalist philosopher.

In 1920, Flewelling founded and became the editor of the journal The Personalist. He became a professor at the University of Southern California in 1927. Flewelling supplemented Christian theism with such “conventional fictions” of science and philosophy as absolute truth and the spatial and temporal world. He believed that devotion to higher concepts, and primarily to god, led to a better life and a better society. Modern society, in Flewelling’s view, was undergoing a crisis. He attributed this crisis to a conflict between the cultures of the West and East, and asserted that West and East could be reconciled through a return to the principles of early Christianity.

WORKS

Personalism and the Problems of Philosophy. New York, 1915.
The Reason in Faith. New York [1924].
Creative Personality. New York, 1926.
The Survival of Western Culture. New York–London, 1943.
Conflict and Conciliation of Cultures. Stockton, Calif., 1951.
The Person or the Significance of Man. Los Angeles, 1952.

REFERENCES

Shershenko, L. A. “Amerikanskii personalizm.” In the collection Sovremennyi ob”ektivnyi idealizm. Moscow, 1963.
Bogomolov, A. S. Burzhuaznaia filosofiia SShA XX veka. Moscow, 1974.

A. S. BOGOMOLOV