Geary once referred to the triad of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as "a triad
if dead white men."
I would add, alas, Morton White.
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 in Skillman, N.J.
His death was announced by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, not
far from Skillman, and where White taught.
OTOH Grice's death was announced by a nurse.
White was best known to generations of philosophers as the editor of two
standard compilations.
The first was “The Age of Analysis," a tirade against Popper and an anthology
of writings from key 20th-century philosophers, for which he supplied an
introduction and commentary.
The second, co-edited with his wife Lucia, is “The Intellectual Versus the
City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright"
Grice was more familiar with exurbia tan "city" or 'town' as he preferred. His
favourite exurbia being Darien on Long Island Sound.
White & White survey the conflicted attitudes about the merits of rural and
urban life.
As a philosopher, White (not to be confused with Black, a Russian philosopher)
was identified with holistic pragmatism, an effort to rescue philosophy from
what he (White, not Black) 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.
Oddly, not far from Darien there is a national landmark locally known as the
valley of the Sleeping Giant (his name is Wilfrid), seat of a prestigious polo
club.
Building on the work of Willard Van Orman Quine (one of Grice's two
intellectual mentors, the other was Chomskyh) and Nelson Goodman, White
conceives 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 states.
White explored his ideas in strictly philosophical works like “Toward Reunion
in Philosophy” and in sweeping intellectual histories, including "Social
Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism,"study of John Dewey (Grice
was a Dewey lecturer), Oliver Wendell Holmes (not to be confused with Sherlock,
"who possibly never existed" annotates Geary), and Thorstein Veblen ("if you
heard of him," Geary annotates, and disimplicates, "and even if you haven't"),
and "Science and Sentiment in America: Philosophical Thought From Jonathan
Edwards to John Dewey."
Stanley Katz, of Princeton, metaphorically dubbed White "philosophy’s
ambassador."
Katz did not implicate to what.
White born Morton Gabriel Weisberger 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, "that sold good shoes," Geary adds.
Morton excelled in school, first at P.S. 114 and later at Seward Park (he
graduated at 15), but felt little in the way of intellectual stirrings.
"I was a child of the streets and the shoe store,” he wrote in his memoir, "A
Philosopher’s Story,."
“I was a lonely, unreligious child who knew little about what is sometimes
called the spiritual life, little about philosophical essays, and much about
films, 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.
Grice starts the conceptual analysis of "freedom" with expressions like
'sugar-free' and 'tuition-free' (unknown, both, in his time at Oxford: "We
never said we had our tea sugar-free.")
White absorbed radical politics and initially set his sights on becoming a
lawyer, or attorney, alla H. L. A. Hart and others.
White (not Hart) drifted gradually toward philosophy after taking an
introductory survey course and plunging into the study of logic, alla Grice.
"I could solve the problems of the world while I had fun and learned how to
earn a living."
After graduating with a BA in social science, White abandoned (unlike Hart) the
idea of studying law.
Columbia lent White the money to enroll in its graduate school, where he wrote
a thesis on the pragmatist and logician C. S. Peirce and earned MA.
At this time Grice was lecturing on Peirce at Oxford.
For his doctorate, whuch Grice never earned (it's deemed "too clever," with the
attending disimplicature, to earn one), but White did, wrote about Dewey’s
early thought, specifically his theory that ideas are not a mirror of reality
but a plan of action.
Yes, a plan of Dewey's action.
The dissertation was published as “The Origins of Dewey’s Instrumentalism.
"The end of it I must leave for a longer day."
Geary annotates: aren't all days 24 hours long?
White married Lucia Perry.
Not to be confused with Perry (editor of Personal identity, which reprints
Grice's Classic).
White's second wife is Helen Starobin.
White is survived by his sons, Nicholas and Stephen; five grandchildren; and
two great-grandchildren.
While teaching at Pennsylvania, White became friends with Goodman, whose
theories on hypotheses and inductive reasoning influenced him decisively.
A second, even more powerful influence was Quine, whom he met after joining
Harvard’s philosophy department, where Grice gave the bi-annual William James
Philosophical Lectures.
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.
Quine had applied this insight to natural sciences and logic, but White
extended it to religion, history, art and morality.
Whether he succeeded (+> or not) is for MvEvoy to say (or implicate or show and
tell as he'd prefer)
White addressed these problems in a seminal essay published in “The Analytic
and the Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism,” citing Grice, and at greater length
in “Toward Reunion in Philosophy,” which he dedicated to Goodman and Quine.
White later refined his theories in “Religion, Politics and the Higher
Learning”, “Foundations of Historical Knowledge”, “What Is and What Ought to Be
Done: An Essay on Ethics and Epistemology” and “A Philosophy of Culture: The
Scope of Holistic Pragmatism”.
He also edited “Paths of American Thought” with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and
“Documents in the History of American Philosophy”.
Grice is cited even if he's English. Foucault is not.
Cheers
Speranza------------------------------------------------------------------
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