 Blanshard was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then won a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where his tutor was H.W.B. Joseph and he also met Bradley, a lifelong research fellow at Merton. After earning an MA at Columbia, where he participated in a research project under John Dewey, and then World War I service in France, he completed his Oxford BA and then a PhD at Harvard under the supervision of C.I. Lewis—so he had a very diverse philosophical education. He taught at Swarthmore College from 1925 to 1944 and at Yale from 1944 until 1961. Remarkably, Blanshard was at different points in this career in the same department as each of the Sellarses—he was an undergraduate at Michigan when Roy Wood Sellars was a young teacher there, and was then Wilfrid Sellars’s colleague during the latter’s tenure at Yale from 1958 to 1963. There are affinities between his views and theirs, especially with Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of conceptually-informed perception; but they differ decidedly on the issue of idealism vs. material realism. Blanshard’s idealism was at full-strength in the two volumes of The Nature of Thought (1939), which was dedicated to the Oxford idealists H.H. Joachim and E.F. Carritt; many arguments remained the same but the inference to idealism was somewhat toned-down in his later trilogy, Reason and Goodness (1961), Reason and Analysis (1962), and Reason and Belief (1974).