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Norman Malcolm

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For the Jamaican cricket umpire, see Norman Malcolm (umpire).
For the Australian journalist, see Norman Malcolm (journalist).
Norman Malcolm
Born(1911-06-11)11 June 1911
Selden, Kansas, U.S.
Died4 August 1990(1990-08-04) (aged 79)
London, England
Education
Alma materUniversity of Nebraska
Harvard University
Academic advisorsO. K. Bouwsma
C. I. Lewis[1]
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical work
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
InstitutionsCornell University
Main interestsPhilosophy of mind Philosophy of religion Wittgenstein
Notable ideasCriticism of common sense beliefs, ontological argument from the distinction between necessary and contingent beings
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Norman Adrian Malcolm (/ˈmælkəm/; 11 June 1911 – 4 August 1990) was an American philosopher. Malcolm was primarily active in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology.

Biography

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Malcolm was born in Selden, Kansas. He studied philosophy with O. K. Bouwsma at the University of Nebraska, then enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University in 1933.

At Cambridge University in 1938–9, he met G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Malcolm attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophical foundations of mathematics throughout 1939 and remained one of Wittgenstein's closest friends. Malcolm's memoir of his time with Wittgenstein, published in 1958, is widely acclaimed as one of the most captivating and most accurate portraits of Wittgenstein's remarkable personality.

After serving in the United States Navy from 1942 to 1945, Malcolm, with his wife, Leonida, and their son, Raymond Charles Malcolm, resided in Cambridge again in 1946–47. He saw a good deal of Wittgenstein during that time, and they continued to correspond frequently thereafter. In 1947, Malcolm joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he taught until his retirement. In 1949, Wittgenstein was a guest of the Malcolms in Ithaca, New York. In that year Malcolm introduced O. K. Bouwsma to Wittgenstein. Bouwsma remained close to Wittgenstein until Wittgenstein's death in 1951.

Malcolm was a Fulbright research fellow at University of Helsinki during the academic year of 1960-1961.[2] From 1972-73 he was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and in 1975 joined the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[3] he died in London England in 1990

Philosophical work

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In 1959, his book Dreaming was published, in which he elaborated on Wittgenstein's question as to whether it really mattered if people who tell dreams "really had these images while they slept, or whether it merely seems so to them on waking". This work was also a response to Descartes' Meditations.[4]

Other than that he is known for propagating the view that common sense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy are the same. He was generally supportive of Moore's theory of knowledge and certitude, though he found Moore's style and method of arguing to be ineffective.[5] His critique of Moore's articles on skepticism (and also on Moore's 'Here is a hand' argument) lay the foundation for the renewed interest in common sense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy.[6] He was among the most important and influential of the ordinary-language philosophers in the United States.[3]

Malcolm was also a defender of a modal version of the ontological argument. In 1960 he argued that the argument originally presented by Anselm of Canterbury in the second chapter of his Proslogion was just an inferior version of the argument propounded in chapter three.[7][8] His argument is similar to those produced by Charles Hartshorne and Alvin Plantinga. Malcolm argued that a God cannot simply exist as a matter of contingency but rather must exist in necessity if at all. He argued that if God exists in contingency then his existence is subject to a series of conditions that would then be greater than God and this would be a contradiction (referring to Anselm's definition of God as That than which Nothing Greater can be Conceived).

Publications

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Books

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  • Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (with a biographical sketch by G. H. von Wright)[9][10][11]
  • Wittgenstein: A Religious Point Of View? (edited by Peter Winch) [12]doi:10.4324/9780203046241 ISBN 9780203046241
  • Nothing Is Hidden: Wittgenstein's criticism of his early thought[13][14]
  • Problems of Mind: Descartes to Wittgenstein ISBN 9781032102924[15][16]
  • Consciousness and Causality (with D. M. Armstrong)[17]
  • Memory and Mind ISBN 9780801410185[18]
  • Wittgenstein: The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour (J.R.Jones Memorial Lecture) Publisher: University of Wales, Swansea (Dec 1981) ISBN 0860760243[19]
  • Thought and Knowledge: Essay by Norman Malcolm doi:10.7591/9781501738760 ISBN 9781501738760

Essays

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Reviews

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References

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  1. ^ "Malcolm, Norman (1911–1990)" – Encyclopedia.com
  2. ^ Malcolm, Norman (1963). "Preface". Knowledge and Certainty: Essays and Lectures by Norman Malcolm. Prentice-Hall.
  3. ^ a b Shook, John R., ed. (2016). The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers in America From 1600 to the Present. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 620.
  4. ^ Pastor, Rebecca. "Norman Malcolm's Critique of Descartes' Skepticism"
  5. ^ Norman Malcolm (1952), "Moore and Ordinary Language", The Philosophy of G. E. Moore
  6. ^ Scott Soames (2003) "Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II: The Age of Meaning." Chapter 7
  7. ^ Norman Malcolm (1960), "Anselm's Ontological Arguments," Philosophical Review, 69:41–62.
  8. ^ Case, Brendan (16 September 2021). "Bonaventure's Critique of Thomas Aquinas". Church Life Journal. Retrieved 2023-04-29. Though no one pointed this out explicitly until Norman Malcolm in the mid-twentieth century, Bonaventure and Aquinas alike seem to have recognized that Anselm in fact developed two distinct versions of the ontological argument.[42] Malcolm distinguishes them as follows: Anselm's "first ontological proof [in Pros. 2] uses the principle that a thing is greater if it exists than if it does not exist. His second proof [in Pros. 3] employs the different principle that a thing is greater if it necessarily exists than if it does not necessarily exist."[...] [42] The first person to explicitly flag that there are two distinct arguments in Prologion 2-3 was Norman Malcolm, in "Anselm's Ontological Arguments," 44-46.
  9. ^ Broad, C. D (May 1959). "Review of Ludwig Wittgenstein; A Memoir" (PDF). Universities Quarterly. 13 (3): 304–306. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2273.1959.tb00113.x. ISSN 0951-5224.
  10. ^ Rollins, C. D. (1959). "Review of Ludwig Wittgenstein; A Memoir". The Journal of Philosophy. 56 (6): 280–283. doi:10.2307/2022462. ISSN 0022-362X.
  11. ^ Vlastos, Gregory (1960). "Review of Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir". The Philosophical Review. 69 (1): 105–108. doi:10.2307/2182271. ISSN 0031-8108.
  12. ^ Finch, Henry Le Roy (October 1995). "Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (review)". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 33 (4): 702–703. doi:10.1353/hph.1995.a225891. ISSN 1538-4586.
  13. ^ Pears, David (1989). "Review of Nothing is Hidden: Wittgenstein's Criticism of his Early Thought". The Philosophical Review. 98 (3): 379–386. doi:10.2307/2185024. ISSN 0031-8108.
  14. ^ Mulhall, Stephen (1987). "Review of Nothing is Hidden: Wittgenstein's Criticism of his Early Thought". Mind. 96 (381): 113–116. ISSN 0026-4423.
  15. ^ Whiteley, C. H. (1972-10-01). "Book Reviews". The Philosophical Quarterly. 22 (89): 367. doi:10.2307/2218318. ISSN 0031-8094.
  16. ^ Norman, Malcolm (1974). "Authors' Abstracts of Recent Books". The Monist. 58 (4): 712. ISSN 0026-9662.
  17. ^ Morton, Adam (September 1985). "D. M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm, Consciousness and Causality". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 36 (3): 341–344. doi:10.1093/bjps/36.3.341. ISSN 0007-0882.
  18. ^ Amundson, Ron (1981). "Review of Memory and Mind". Noûs. 15 (1): 101–106. doi:10.2307/2215250. ISSN 0029-4624.
  19. ^ Malcolm, Norman (January 1982). "Wittgenstein: The relation of language to instinctive behaviour". Philosophical Investigations. 5 (1): 3–22. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9205.1982.tb00531.x. ISSN 0190-0536.
  20. ^ Malcolm, Norman (1995). Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays, 1978-1989. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3042-8.
  21. ^ Ayer, A. J. (1960). "Professor Malcolm on Dreams". The Journal of Philosophy. 57 (16): 517–535. doi:10.2307/2023332. ISSN 0022-362X.
  22. ^ Pears, D. F. (1961). "Professor Norman Malcolm: Dreaming". Mind. 70 (278): 145–163. ISSN 0026-4423.
  23. ^ Yost, R. M. (1960). "Review of Dreaming". The Philosophical Review. 69 (4): 534–536. doi:10.2307/2183488. ISSN 0031-8108.
  24. ^ Kattsoff, Louis O. (1965). "Malcolm on Knowledge and Certainty". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 26 (2): 263–267. doi:10.2307/2106189. ISSN 0031-8205.

Further reading

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