Morton White, a philosopher and historian of ideas whose innovative theory of “holistic pragmatism” showed the way toward a more socially engaged, interdisciplinary role for philosophy, died on May 27 in Skillman, N.J. He was 99.
His death was announced by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he had taught from 1970 until his retirement in 1987.
Mr. White was best known to generations of history and philosophy undergraduates as the editor of two standard classroom texts. The first was “The Age of Analysis” (1955), an anthology of writings from key 20th-century philosophers, for which he supplied an introduction and commentary.
The second, edited with his wife, the sociologist Lucia White, was “The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright” (1962). It surveyed the conflicted American attitudes about the merits of rural and urban life.
As a philosopher, Professor White was identified with holistic pragmatism, an effort to rescue philosophy from what he saw as the narrow preoccupations of the dominant analytic movement, with its parsings of statements and the constituent parts of complex notions. “There are many signs that the sleeping giant of philosophy is arousing itself out of its mathematical slumbers,” he wrote in “Religion, Politics and the Higher Learning” (1959).
Building on the work of Willard Van Orman Quine and Nelson Goodman, Professor White conceived of pragmatic analysis as an all-embracing venture incorporating ethics, politics and the social sciences.
“In my view, holistic pragmatism is a theory that may be applied to all disciplines that seek truth,” he wrote in one of the essays in his collection “From a Philosophical Point of View: Selected Studies” (2005).
Professor White explored his ideas in strictly philosophical works like “Toward Reunion in Philosophy” (1956) and in sweeping intellectual histories, including “Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism” (1949), a study of John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thorstein Veblen and other thinkers, and “Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey” (1972).
In an obituary on the website of the Institute for Advanced Study, Stanley N. Katz, a historian at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, called Mr. White “philosophy’s ambassador to history and the humanities.”
He was born Morton Gabriel Weisberger on April 29, 1917, in Manhattan to Robert Weisberger and the former Esther Levine and grew up on the Lower East Side, where his family owned a shoe store.
Morton excelled in school, first at P.S. 114 and later at Seward Park High School (he graduated at 15), but felt little in the way of intellectual stirrings. “I was a child of the streets and the store,” he wrote in his memoir, “A Philosopher’s Story,” published in 1999. “I was a lonely, unreligious child who knew little about what is sometimes called the spiritual life, little about books, and much about movies, sports, restaurants, prizefighters, baseball players and politics.”
The shoe store went bankrupt during the Depression, and he enrolled in City College, which was tuition-free. He absorbed radical politics and initially set his sights on becoming a lawyer. He drifted gradually toward philosophy after taking an introductory survey course and plunging into the study of logic. “ I could solve the problems of the world while I had fun and learned how to earn a living,” he wrote in his memoir.
After graduating in 1936 with a bachelor’s degree in social science, he abandoned the idea of studying law. Columbia University lent him the money to enroll in its graduate school, where he wrote a thesis on the pragmatist and logician C. S. Peirce and earned a master’s degree in 1938.
For his doctorate, which he received in 1942, he wrote about Dewey’s early thought, specifically his theory that ideas are not a mirror of reality but a plan of action. It was published in 1943 as “The Origins of Dewey’s Instrumentalism.”
In 1949, he married Lucia Perry, who died in 1996. His second wife, the former Helen Starobin, died in 2012. He is survived by his sons Nicholas and Stephen, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor White became friends with Mr. Goodman, whose theories on hypotheses and inductive reasoning influenced him decisively. A second, even more powerful influence was Mr. Quine, whom he met after joining Harvard’s philosophy department in 1948.
Mr. Quine proposed a holistic approach to understanding how human beings test beliefs against experience — not one by one, but as an interconnected system of beliefs. He had applied this insight to natural sciences and logic, but Professor White extended it to religion, history, art and morality.
He addressed these problems in a seminal essay published in 1950, “The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism,” and at greater length in “Toward Reunion in Philosophy,” which he dedicated to Goodman and Quine. He later refined his theories in “Religion, Politics and the Higher Learning” (1959), “Foundations of Historical Knowledge” (1965), “What Is and What Ought to Be Done: An Essay on Ethics and Epistemology” (1981) and “A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism” (2002).
He also edited “Paths of American Thought” (1963), with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and “Documents in the History of American Philosophy.”
No comments:
Post a Comment