Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge

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Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge (born March 26, 1867 in Windsor (Ontario) , † 1940 in New York ) was an American philosopher who characterized his position as naive realism .

Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge in 1935.jpg

Life

Woodbridge, the son of James and Melissa Ella, née Bingham, grew up in Kalamazoo in 1869 . From 1885 to 1989 he studied philosophy and religion at Amherst College with Charles Edward Garman. He continued his studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York and had a stay abroad in Berlin in 1893/1894 . In 1894 he received a position as a lecturer at the University of Minnesota . In 1895 he married Helena Belle Adams. In 1902 he moved to Columbia University in New York, where he was co-founder and editor of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods , from 1921 The Journal of Philosophy . The magazine was an organ of the representatives of pragmatism , realism and naturalism . Woodbridge was from 1912 to 1929 Dean of the Faculties of Political Science, Philosophy and Theoretical Sciences. He retired in 1939. Since 1933 he was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Woodbridge's philosophical position was shaped by his teacher George Santayana and is related to the positions of John Dewey , Morris Raphael Cohen and Roy Wood Sellars . This includes the realistic point of view, the rejection of a supernatural transcendality , the rejection of a dualism in the philosophy of mind and the emphasis on scientific methodology as the sole source of knowledge . Woodbridge made important contributions to overcoming idealism and neo-Kantianism and to the revival of Aristotelianism in America. The history of philosophy was very important to him. He was more interested in the methods and the significance of historical figures for the present than an exact philological tracing of the ideas.

Woodbridge's students include John Herman Randall, Jr. and Ernest Nagel . A chair at Columbia University is named after him.

Fonts

  • Metaphysics Columbia University, 1908
  • The Purpose of History , 1916
  • The Realm of Mind , 1926
  • Contrasts in Education , 1929
  • The Son of Apollo: Themes of Plato , 1929
  • Nature and Mind. Selected Essays , 1937
  • An Essay on Nature , 1940
  • Aristotle's Vision of Nature (ed. John H. Randall Jr., 1965)

literature

  • CF Delaney: Mind and Nature. A Study of the Naturalistic Philosophy of Cohen, Woodbridge and Sellars . University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1969
  • William Frank Jones: Nature and Natural Science. The Philosophy of FJE Woodbridge . Prometheus Books, Buffalo 1983.
  • John Ryder (Ed.): American Philosophic Naturalism in the 20th Century . Prometheus Books, Amherst / NY 1994

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members: Frederick JE Woodbridge. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woodbridge, FJE
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Windsor, Ontario
DATE OF DEATH 1940
Place of death new York