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C. D. Broad

Charlie Dunbar Broad was an English philosopher who spent most of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge. Wide-ranging and meticulous, he wrote on perception,…

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Also known as Charlie Dunbar Broad

1887 – 1971 · Cambridge; St Andrews; Bristol

Traditions: Analytic

Charlie Dunbar Broad was an English philosopher who spent most of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge. Wide-ranging and meticulous, he wrote on perception, time, mind, ethics and the history of philosophy, and took an interest in psychical research. In The Mind and Its Place in Nature he gave what became the classical statement of emergentism: that some properties of wholes cannot, even in principle, be deduced from the properties and arrangement of their parts.

Key ideas

  • Emergent properties of a whole are not deducible even from complete knowledge of its parts and their arrangement.
  • Emergentism is a middle path between mechanism and vitalism in explaining life and mind.
  • Philosophical positions on mind and body can be sorted into a systematic map of logically possible options.
  • His growing-block view treated the past and present as real but not the future.

Major works

  • Scientific Thought (1923)
  • The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925)
  • Five Types of Ethical Theory (1930)

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