James Edwin Creighton

James Edwin Creighton (April 8, 1861, Pictou, Nova Scotia – October 8, 1924, Ithaca, New York) was an American idealist philosopher and Cornell academic. He was the founding president of the American Philosophical Association. Creighton graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from Dalhousie College, Halifax, in 1887, and pursued further studies at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin. He later obtained a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1892. He taught at Cornell, progressing from instructor to associate professor and then to Sage professor of logic and metaphysics in 1895. From 1914 to 1923, he served as the Dean of the Graduate School at Cornell. His notable works include "Introductory Logic" (1898), a widely used college textbook, and collaborations on translations of Wundt and Paulsen. He was the editor of "The Philosophical Review" since 1892 and the American editor of "Kant-Studien" since 1896. He was also the founding president of the American Philosophical Association. Creighton's philosophical thought was influenced by Kant, Bradley, and Bosanquet, and he engaged with the ideas of Windelband and Rickert. He championed Idealistic philosophy, countering movements like Pragmatism, neo-Realism, and Materialism. He distinguished between intelligibility in philosophy and in natural sciences and emphasized the social nature of thought. He received honorary degrees from Queen's University and Dalhousie University. Creighton continued his work at Cornell until his death in 1924 and is buried in East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca.