Hartley Burr Alexander: Humanistic Personalism and Pluralism

Thomas M. Alexander, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Human personality itself is the essential ground of any reality that we men can know.
— God and Man's Destiny

IT WILL BE THE AIM of this article to present the central ideas of the philosophy of Hartley Burr Alexander. This is not an easy task because his thought directly engages what might be called the significance of mythic consciousness and meaning. And for a philosopher to do this implicitly runs against one of the fundamental stories Western philosophy tells itself to understand what it is, which is that philosophy itself is reason divorced from myth and from its natural form of expression, poetry. In other words, this is the "myth" (or "mythos") of Western philosophy—that it is a rejection of myth! This bears some thought before proceeding to Hartley Alexander's philosophy.