Bowne, Borden Parker (1847–1910)

Bowne was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the American personalist school of philosophy. His position is theistic and idealistic, and finds in human persons the key to meaning in the world. Knowledge comes only through personal experience, through which we understand ourselves to be enduring thinking entities with a certain degree of freedom. The uniformity of God’s activity is such as to make nature intelligible to us, but our minds are nevertheless independent of God’s.