Ralph Barton Perry, the American realist philosopher, was born in Poultney, Vermont. He attended Princeton University, where he received his B.A. in 1896; he received his M.A. from Harvard in 1897 and his Ph.D. in 1899. For a brief period he taught at Williams and Smith colleges. From 1902 to 1946 he taught at Harvard, where, after 1930, he was the Edgar Pierce professor of philosophy. He was Hyde lecturer at various French universities during the year 1921–1922. In 1920 he was elected president of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association, and he served as Gifford lecturer from 1946 to 1948.

Perry was the author of some two hundred essays and two dozen books, in addition to countless lectures and letters to newspapers, and he was considered the chief living authority on William James. Perry believed that a comprehensiveness of view is philosophy's contribution to human wisdom...