Morton White

Morton G. White ( born April 29, 1917 in New York City ) is an American philosopher and historian of ideas. He is one of the central figures of the holistic pragmatism and an acquaintance expert on the history of American philosophy. From 1953 to 1970 he was a professor at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he is currently professor emeritus.

Life and academic career

White was born in the Lower East Side of New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York and went as a graduate student at Columbia University, where he was heavily influenced by John Dewey. His Ph.D. he acquired there 1942. 1949 he published Social Thought in America, a critical history of social philosophy as it presented itself in the thinking of John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Thorstein Veblen, Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson. In a new preface, which he added on the occasion of a re- issue in 1957, he took his rebuke back partially. Also, he added a postscript in which he attacked strongly both the religious liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr and the conservative position of Walter Lippmann. He wrote: "Time and recent events, have Brought the liberal outlook under a very different kind of attack -an attack with Which I have no sympathy -and I did my own fear critical observations might also be wrongly associated with arguments, positions, and purposes. quite foreign to my own " ( German: " the passage of time and recent events have liberal views of a new type of attack exposed - one that I have for no good will - and I fear that my own critical observations falsely with arguments, and intentions could be made in common that are extremely foreign to mine "). His book Toward Reunion in Philosophy in 1956 represented an attempt to make the schools of American pragmatism and analytic philosophy compatible.

At Harvard, White was for many years a colleague of Willard Van Orman Quine; their philosophical positions are closely related, especially the rejection of a sharp distinction between judgments a priori and empirical judgments within the meaning of Rudolf Carnap. Unlike Quine, however, White rejects the reduction of philosophy to the philosophy of science. For White can be any cultural institution subject Philosophical investigation within the framework of holistic pragmatism, as well as the arts or the rights.

Publications (selection)

  • The Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (Columbia University Press, 1943)
  • Social Thought in America: the revolt against formalism (Viking, 1949)
  • (Ed.) The Mentor Philosophers: The Age of Analysis: Twentieth century philosophers ( Houghton Mifflin, 1955)
  • Toward Reunion in Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1956)
  • With Lucia White The Intellectual versus the City: from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright ( Harvard, 1962)
  • With Arthur M. Schlesinger (ed.): Paths of American Thought ( Houghton Mifflin, 1963)
  • The Foundations of Historical Knowledge ( Harper & Row, 1965)
  • Science and sentiment in America ( Oxford University Press, 1972)
  • The Philosophy of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1978 )
  • What Is and What Ought to be Done: an essay on ethics and epistemology (Oxford University Press, 1981) Dt: What is and what should be done: an essay on ethics and. Epistemology. Edited and introduced by Herbert Stachowiak. Transl. by Thomas Czempin, Freiburg: Alber, 1987, ISBN 3-495-47622-9
History of ideas Princeton (New Jersey) Empiricism Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. WorldCat Integrated Authority File
583035
de