John Herman Randall Jr. (February 14, 1899 – December 1, 1980) was an American philosopher and educator.
Randall was born on February 14, 1899, inGrand Rapids, Michigan. The son of John Herman Randall Sr., aBaptist minister, he obtained hisA.B. fromColumbia University in 1918. He obtained anA.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 andIrwin Edman. Other influences were his teacherJohn Dewey,Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, John J. Cross,Wendell T. Bush, stockbroker Albert Redpath and historianFrank Tannenbaum.[1] 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.[citation needed]
Randall was hired as a philosophy lecturer by Columbia in 1920 and he stayed at the university for the remainder of his career.[1] He was promoted to assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia in 1925. He was a member of theAmerican Philosophical Association, theEthical Culture Society,Alpha Delta Phi andPhi Beta Kappa. He served as president of theMetaphysical Society of America in 1967. For fifteen years at Columbia University, he served as the Chair of the University Seminar onThe Renaissance which he co-founded withPaul Oskar Kristeller.[2] His students includeJohn P. Anton.
He publishedThe Problem of Group Responsibility in 1922 andThe Making of the Modern Mind in 1926.[3] He also coauthoredThe Introduction to Contemporary Civilization and wrote an influential study ofAristotle, entitled simplyAristotle. Some of his other books includeNature 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, andThe Career of Philosophy, a three-volume history of philosophy from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. He was one of signers of theHumanist Manifesto in 1933.[4]
