Arthur F. Bentley
American political scientist and philosopher
Arthur Fisher Bentley (October 16, 1870 – May 21, 1957) was an American political scientist and philosopher who worked in the fields of epistemology, logic and linguistics and who contributed to the development of a behavioral methodology of political science.
Family
The son of Charles Frederick Bentley (1843–1908), and Angeline Alice Bentley (1845–1911), née Dreisbach, Arthur Fisher Bentley was born at in Freeport, Illinois on 16 October 1870. He married Anna Harrison (1868–1924) in 1899.
Education
He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1892 and his Ph.D. in 1895 from Johns Hopkins University. He studied with Herbert Baxter Adams, who in turn had been trained in Germany.
Career
He taught at the University of Chicago for one year (1895–1896) and then decided to become a reporter. Later, he transitioned into editorial work at two Chicago papers, the Times-Herald and the Record-Herald. He left Chicago and life as a reporter in 1911, claiming poor health, and moved to a farm near Paoli, Indiana, where he lived for the rest of his life. The son of a successful banker, Bentley was able to finance his life as a scholar without having to work for an income. He was the second person to win the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award, in 1954.
“Arthur F. Bentley” enters the record as american political scientist and philosopher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Arthur, Bentley and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4798634. VIAF identifies the subject as 44293614. The Library of Congress control number is n50007415. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1870, 1957, 1843 and 1908.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arthur F. Bentley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.