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Biography
Charles Norris Cochrane (August 21, 1889 – November 23, 1945) was a Canadian historian and philosopher who taught at the University of Toronto.
He was educated at the University of Toronto and also at the University of Oxford, where he was taught and influenced by R.G. Collingwood.
His Thucydides and the Science of History appeared in 1929, and his best-known work, Christianity and Classical Culture, in 1940. The latter work was greatly admired by W.H. Auden, and it was in addition described by Harold Innis as "the first major Canadian contribution to the intellectual history of the West".
The Hegelian philosopher James Doull was among his students. Doull's friend George Grant was also a very great admirer of Cochrane.
Arthur Kroker remarks that "Charles Norris Cochrane...is the one thinker who understood deeply and well the generative origins of Christianity as a response to a larger cultural crisis that secular thought, whether Roman or Greek, could not solve for itself. At the same time, Cochrane understood in full detail the coming crisis of Christianity and nihilism".