John Herman Randall, Jr.

John Herman Randall Jr. (February 14, 1899 – December 1, 1980) was an American pragmatic naturalist philosopher.

Early life Randall was born on February 14, 1899, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The son of John Herman Randall Sr., a Baptist minister, he obtained his A.B. from Columbia University in 1918. He obtained an A.M. the following year and a PhD in 1922, with a dissertation titled "The Problem of Group Responsibility to Society". He was influenced by a close group of friends, including James Gutmann, Horace Fries, Herbert Schneider and Irwin Edman. Other influences were his teacher John Dewey, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, John J. Cross, Wendell T. Bush, stockbroker Albert Redpath and historian Frank Tannenbaum. He married Mercedes Irene Moritz in New York on December 23, 1922, with whom he had two sons, John Herman Randall III and Francis Ballard Randall.

Career Randall was hired as a philosophy lecturer by Columbia in 1920 and he stayed at the university for the remainder of his career. His students include John P. Anton.

He published The Problem of Group Responsibility in 1922 and The Making of the Modern Mind in 1926. He also coauthored The Introduction to Contemporary Civilization and wrote an influential study of Aristotle, entitled simply Aristotle. Some of his other books include Nature and Historical Experience, a collection of essays on metaphysics and the philosophy of history, How Philosophy Uses Its Past, The Role of Knowledge in Western Religion, Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason, Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis, and The Career of Philosophy, a three-volume history of philosophy from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. He was one of signers of the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.

He was the doctoral advisor of Justus Buchler.

Death Randall died in New York City in 1980.