Dr. John Herman Randall Jr. was an American historian, philosopher, New Thought author, and educator who wrote a series of highly respected works on the history of philosophy. Randall was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of John Herman Randall Sr., a Baptist minister. He married Mercedes Irene Moritz in December 1922, and they had two sons, John Herman Randall III and Francis Ballard Randall.
Randall studied under historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson at Columbia University, New York, where he began teaching in 1921 and earned his Ph.D. in 1922, with a dissertation titled The Problem of Group Responsibility to Society. In his first major work, The Western Mind, 2 vol. (1924), revised and reissued as The Making of the Modern Mind (1926), Randall reconstructed the times and conditions, as well as the historical experience and traditions, that gave rise to certain philosophical systems. His Career of Philosophy in Modern Times, 2 vol. (1962–65), is an analysis of the historical context surrounding the 17th- and 18th-century assimilation of science into traditional interpretive frameworks. In his Aristotle (1960), Randall again placed Aristotle’s thought into its own historical context and drew out its implications and relevance for modern man.