From a Philosophical Point of View : : Selected Studies / / Morton White.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter PUP eBook-Package 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: White, Morton,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2009]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

One of the most important philosophers of recent times, Morton White has spent a career building bridges among the increasingly fragmented worlds of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. From a Philosophical Point of View is a selection of White's best essays, written over a period of more than sixty years. Together these selections represent the belief that philosophers should reflect not only on mathematics and science but also on other aspects of culture, such as religion, art, history, law, education, and morality. White's essays cover the full range of his interests: studies in ethics, the theory of knowledge, and metaphysics as well as in the philosophy of culture, the history of pragmatism, and allied currents in social, political, and legal thought. The book also includes pieces on philosophers who have influenced White at different stages of his career, among them William James, John Dewey, G. E. Moore, and W. V. Quine. Throughout, White argues from a holistic standpoint against a sharp epistemological distinction between logical and physical beliefs and also against an equally sharp one between descriptive and normative beliefs. White maintains that once the philosopher abandons the dogma that the logical analysis of mathematics and physics is the essence of his subject, he frees himself to resume his traditional role as a student of the central institutions of civilization. Philosophers should function not merely as spectators of all time and existence, he argues, but as empirically minded students of culture who try to use some of their ideas for the benefit of society.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction: What I Have Learned by Rereading These Essays -- PART I Prolegomena -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 1 Prologue to A Philosophy of Culture (2002) -- CHAPTER 2 Philosophy and Man: An Exhortation (1955) -- CHAPTER 3 The Social Role of Philosophy (1952) -- CHAPTER 4. New Horizons in Philosophy (1960) -- PART II History -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 5 A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History (1953) -- CHAPTER 6 Historical Relativism and the Evaluation of Histories (2003) -- CHAPTER 7 Historical Inevitability (1956) -- CHAPTER 8. Tolstoy the Empirical Fox (2003) -- PART III Religion, Education, and Politics -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 9. John Dewey: A Great Philosopher of Education (1966) -- CHAPTER 10. Religion, Politics, and the Higher Learning (1954) -- CHAPTER 11. Religious Commitment and Higher Education (1957) -- CHAPTER 12. The University in Transition (1966) -- CHAPTER 13. Philosophy in a Utopian Institute for Advanced Study (1989) -- PART IV. Analyticity, Morality, Causality, and Liberty -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 14. The Analytic and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism (1950) -- CHAPTER 15. Ontological Clarity and Semantic Obscurity (1951) -- CHAPTER 16. On the Church-Frege Solution of the Paradox of Analysis (1948) -- CHAPTER 17. Oughts and Cans (1979) -- CHAPTER 18. Causation and Action (1969) -- CHAPTER 19. Hart and Honoré on Causation in the Law (1960) -- CHAPTER 20. The Question of Free Will: Some Preliminary Remarks (1993) -- PART V. Pragmatism -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 21. Harvard's Philosophical Heritage (1957) -- CHAPTER 22. Experiment and Necessity in Dewey's Philosophy (1959) -- CHAPTER 23. Value and Obligation in Dewey and Lewis (1949) -- CHAPTER 24. Desire and Desirability: A Rejoinder to a Posthumous Reply by John Dewey (1996) -- CHAPTER 25. Peirce's Summum Bonum and the Ethical Views of C. I. Lewis and John Dewey (1999) -- CHAPTER 26. Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, and Quine's Holism (1986) -- CHAPTER 27. Holistic Pragmatism and Ethics (2002) -- CHAPTER 28. The Psychologism of Hume and Arithmetical Truth (2003) -- PART VI. History of Ideas -- Introduction -- CHAPTER 29. Why Annalists of Ideas Should Be Analysts of Ideas (1975) -- CHAPTER 30. The Revolt against Formalism in American Social Thought of the Twentieth Century (1947) -- CHAPTER 31. Pragmatism and the Revolt against Formalism: Revising Some Doctrines of William James (1986) -- CHAPTER 32. The Politics of Epistemology (1989) -- CHAPTER 33. Original Sin, Natural Law, and Politics (1956) -- CHAPTER 34. Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Progressive Era (1988) -- CHAPTER 35. The American Intellectual versus the American City (1961) -- CHAPTER 36. The Philosopher and the Metropolis in America (1963) -- PART VII. Philosophers -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER 37. William James (1986) -- CHAPTER 38. The Later Years of George Santayana (1963) -- CHAPTER 39. English Philosophy at Midcentury: An American's Impressions (1951) -- CHAPTER 40. Memories of G. E. Moore (1959) -- CHAPTER 41. W. V. Quine (2001) -- Acknowledgments -- Index