Ralph Barton Perry

Ralph Barton Perry, American philosopher and academic (died 1957)

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Born: July 3, 1876
Died: January 22, 1957
Zodiac sign: Cancer
Birth year: 1876

About Ralph Barton Perry

Ralph Barton Perry was an American philosopher. He was a strident moral idealist who stated in 1909 that, to him, idealism meant "to interpret life consistently with ethical, scientific, and metaphysical truth." Perry's viewpoints on religion stressed the notion that religious thinking possessed legitimacy should it exist within a framework accepting of human reason and social progress. He wrote a celebrated biography of William James, which won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and proceeded to a revision of his critical approach to natural knowledge. A pupil of William James, whose Essays in Radical Empiricism he edited (1912), Perry became one of the leaders of the New Realism movement.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Ralph Barton Perry timeline

1912A pupil of William James, whose Essays in Radical Empiricism he edited (1912), Perry became one of the leaders of the New Realism movement.
1936He wrote a celebrated biography of William James, which won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and proceeded to a revision of his critical approach to natural knowledge.

The world when Ralph Barton Perry was born

Ralph Barton Perry was born in 1876. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

Major sports momentFirst National League baseball season
Top headlineBattle of Little Bighorn — Custer's Last Stand
Technology milestoneAlexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
Notable inventionTelephone
World population~1.56B

United States snapshot

U.S. leaderUlysses S. Grant
U.S. population43.4M

1876 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Ralph Barton Perry's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure	1876	2026
Population	43.4M	341 million

Sources and editorial standards

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