From a Philosophical Point of View: Selected Studies (review)

If he had been born half a century earlier, in 1867 instead of 1917, one suspects that Morton White would have passed a stimulating career among the cohort of pragmatist philosophers at the turn of the century. He would have dedicated himself, in his informal but always astute manner, to extending the insights of his contemporaries William James and John Dewey, who in turn would have welcomed White’s clarifying interventions. Later historians would perhaps have viewed White as the philosopher who made pragmatism a respectable “philosophy of culture,” an empirical worldview encompassing ethics, jurisprudence, history, and natural science. In reality, however, the inclinations that would have found White a natural home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to confront the rather different philosophical climate of the middle decades of the twentieth century. The encounter between White’s philosophical inclinations and the moment in the history of philosophy in which they were brought to bear has profoundly marked White’s philosophy. This tension is revealed in his selected essays, which are drawn from over sixty years of scholarship and speculation in fields as diverse as ethics, semantics, and the history of ideas. Whereas White’s three philosophical heroes—John Stuart Mill, William James, and John Dewey—accepted that the concepts of morality, pedagogy, and jurisprudence were as empirical as those of the natural sciences, the midcentury philosophers with whom White came of age drastically reduced the scope of holistic empiricism. Two of White’s most important contemporary influences, W. V. Quine and Alfred Tarski, echoed the pragmatists in their rejection of philosophical dogma, specifically the purportedly “analytic” status of the truths of logic and pure mathematics. Famously, these two logicians claimed that logical statements derived their meaning from experience in much the same way as the theoretical statements of physical science. Crucially, however, their empiricism stopped at the boundaries of experimental science. Values, legal norms, and historical judgements were not included among the system of posits which, as Quine put it, worked a manageable