Peter Anthony Bertocci succeeded Borden Parker Bowne and Edgar Sheffield Brightman as the leader of the school of Boston personalism, a philosophical-theological perspective influenced by the philosophies of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and George Berkeley that regards reality as ultimately personal in nature. According to this view, personality is a basic category of existence that cannot be reduced to or explained by any more-fundamental concepts, such as mechanistic ones. The ultimate person, and the creator of all other persons, is God.

Bertocci was born on 13 May 1910 in Gaeta, Italy. A few months later his mother, Annunziata Guglietta Bertocci, moved with him and his brother, Angelo Philip, to Somerville, Massachusetts, where their father, Gaetano, had settled and was working in a meat-packing plant. Of the thirteen Bertocci children, only three boys and three girls survived childbirth. The family worked hard and lived frugally, and despite financial strain Bertocci's parents were...