ABSTRACT
Frank Knight was born in 1885 in Illinois.1 His parents were evangelical Protestant farmers of Anglo-Irish descent. Although he reacted against this deeply religious background in his teens, there remain in his teaching some echoes of theological debates, particularly concerning free will and predestination. After attending Milligan College and the University of Tennessee, Knight went to Cornell University in 1913, at first to study philosophy. The lasting influences of Immanuel Kant and Max Weber are detectable in Knight’s writings, and in his conception of the relationship between the social and the natural sciences (Schweitzer, 1975). Pragmatist thinkers influenced Knight to some degree (Hammond, 1991; Hands, 1997), but his use of pragmatism was limited and he had reservations about aspects of this philosophy.2
