Alan Richard White (9 October 1922 – 23 February 1992) was an analytic philosopher who worked mainly in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and, latterly, legal philosophy. Peter Hacker notes that he was "the most skillful developer of Rylean ... ideas in philosophical psychology" and that "if anyone surpassed Austin in subtlety and refinement in the discrimination of grammatical differences, it was White."[2] Richard Swinburne remarks that "during the heyday of 'ordinary language philosophy' no tongue practised it better."[3]
Alan R. White | |
---|---|
Born | Toronto, Ontario, Canada | 9 October 1922
Died | 23 February 1992 Sherwood, Nottingham, England, UK | (aged 69)
Education | B.A., Trinity College Dublin, (1945); PhD,. University of London, (1958) |
Occupation | Philosopher |
Spouse(s) | Eileen Anne Jarvis (1948–1977),[1] Enid Elizabeth Alderson (1979–1992) |
Alan R. White (as he was usually cited)[4] was born in Toronto on 9 October 1922, the elder of two sons born to Irish emigrants George Albert White (1888–1940), an estate agent from Strabane, and Jean Gabriel (Kingston) White (1888–1957).[5] Following their parents' separation in the early 1930s, both brothers moved with their Catholic mother when she returned to her hometown of Cork (where she would work in the drapery trade). There they would be educated in the Protestant faith of their father as boarders at Middleton College until the sixth form. White then transferred to (the Catholic) Presentation College, Cork, to prepare for entrance to Trinity College, Dublin.[5] Despite his religious schooling, within only a few years White would become, as academic colleague Paul Gilbert notes, "a keen atheist."[5]
White was admitted to Trinity in 1941 with a junior exhibition and a sizarship in classics.[5] During his time there he served as president of the University Philosophical Society.[6][7] He graduated in 1945 with firsts in both classics and 'mental and moral science' (philosophy) .[5] He is said. reports David J. Matheson, to have scored over 100 per cent in some of his exams by taking them in Irish, for which extra credit was given.[6][8] Other achievements during his time as an undergraduate included prizes for Hegelian philosophy and flyweight.boxing.[5] That he was also "pugnacious" outside the ring is attested to by Trinity philosopher A. A. Luce who records that the two had "many a battle" when White was a student in his class.[9]
Also through this time, which coincided with "The Emergency" of World War II, White served with the Local Defence Force in the 42nd Dublin Rifle Battalion.[10][11] After graduation he remained at Trinity for a year to pursue further studies in classics and serve as a deputy lecturer in logic.[11]
In 1946 White was appointed as an assistant lecturer in the department of philosophy and psychology at the (then) University College of Hull,[12] the departmental staff initially consisting solely of himself and Professor T. E. Jessop.[5] White obtained this position on the recommendation of Luce[8][13] who had contributed the "Inventory of the Manuscript Remains" to Jessop's A Bibliography of George Berkeley (1934).[14]
Prior to his arrival, Jessop had performed all the teaching duties for both philosophy and psychology.[8] And though Hull's first dedicated psychology lecturer, George Westby, was appointed around the same time as White,[15] the latter would himself also teach psychology as well as philosophy students long after the college acquired university status in 1954 and two separate departments were formed.[5] Ullin Place records that, with the "connivance" of White, Westby. a fellow Rylean, succeeded in making Hull's psychology department "a center for a distinctive amalgam of ordinary language philosophy and behavioral psychology" in its early years.[16] And Westby himself records White's "invaluable co-operation" in initiating and running the three-year "Philosophical Problems of the Sciences" course. The same having been intended to ensure psychology students appreciated "it is impossible to have a purely technical scientific language," [17] a thorough examination of 'Mental' concepts being, as White notes, a necessary preparation "even for those whose chief interest is in the science of psychology."[18]
Within the philosophy department, White progressed to the positions of Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer, succeeding Jessop to become the second Ferens Professor of Philosophy in 1961 (a post he retained until his early retirement in 1985).[11][5] At Hull he would also serve as dean of arts (1969–71) and as pro-vice-chancellor (1976–79).[5]
In 1958 White completed his PhD at the University of London under the supervision of A.J. Ayer, with a thesis on "The Method of Analysis In the Philosophy of G. E. Moore."[11][19][20] That same year would see the publication of the fruits of this research in his first book G.E. Moore: a Critical Exposition.[21][22]
White was a visiting professor at numerous American universities including the University of Maryland (1967–68, 1980), Temple University (1974), Simon Fraser University (1983), the University of Delaware (1986) and Bowling Green State University (1988).[11] He also became known to the first generation of 'third year' students of philosophy at the Open University, participating in a BBC televised discussion on perception[23] that was annually repeated as part of the 'A303, Problems of philosophy' correspondence course which ran from 1973 until 1981.[24][25]
He also served as Secretary, and then president, of the Mind Association and as president of the Aristotelian Society.[6][26]
White retired to Nottingham, and was as appointed Special Professor of Philosophy at the university there in 1986.[26]
In the last decade of his life, as Hacker notes, White worked on jurisprudential problems pertaining to action, intention, voluntariness, negligence and recklessness.[2]
He died at his home in Sherwood, Nottingham on 23 February 1992.[5]
His papers, previously held in the Brynmor Jones Library, are now housed at the Hull History Centre.[26]
A volume of White's selected papers, as edited by Constantine Sandis (who credits White's Grounds of Liability as "a huge influence")[27] with John Preston and David Dolby is forthcoming.[28][29]
A listing of White's publications that includes Reviews can be found at PhilPapers.[107]
White, whose work has not had the influence it merits, was the most skilful developer of Rylean and, to a lesser degree, Wittgensteinian ideas in philosophical psychology. His early work Attention (1964) was a thorough, refined development of Ryle's remarks on 'heed concepts' (see Concept of Mind, pp. 135-49), viz. attending, noticing, awareness, consciousness, realization, care, etc. His later The Nature of Knowledge (1982) was an equally exhaustive investigation of the concepts of knowledge, knowing how and knowing that, the objects of knowledge, and the relation of knowledge to belief. If anyone surpassed Austin in subtlety and refinement in the discrimination of grammatical differences, it was White. His linguistic imagination was, I think, unparalleled, and he applied it with great finesse to a wide range of problems. In the last decade of his life he also worked on jurisprudential problems pertaining to action, intention, voluntariness, negligence and recklessness (Grounds of Liability, an Introduction to the Philosophy of Law (1985) and Misleading Cases (1991).
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In 1958, the year of Moore's death, Professor A. R. White published his book G. E. Moore: A Critical Exposition. White's study, though now, presumably, rarely read, is extremely acute and based on a close reading of Moore's work as he knew it.
Professor White tells us that his book is about the nature of knowledge, rather than about claims to knowledge. The chapter headings, "The Objects of Knowledge", "The Extent of Knowledge", "Criteria of Knowledge" and "Theories of Knowledge", however, make its coverage look wider than it is, By "the objects of knowledge", for example, White does not mean such things as mathematics or science, but the different words and phrases that can follow the verb 'know', like 'who', 'what', 'how', 'the colour of" 'French', 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', 'a man to be honest', 'that the battle was lost'. By talking of the extent of human knowledge White might be expected to be discussing whether it extends to knowledge of the past, the future, other minds, the existence and attributes of the deity, or metaphysics. In fact he is mainly concerned with whether anything that can be believed can also be known, or whether those things which can be believed cannot be known [...] Within its self-imposed limits Professor White has written a clear, concise, well organised, witty, sensitive, elegant, subtle, original and enlightening account of the nature of knowledge.
Discussion of Anscombe's view that perceptual verbs are intentional. White counters this with a distinction between elliptical and non-elliptical- uses of words to explain the apparent divergent senses of perceptual terms which Anscombe's thesis was introduced to explain.
Easily the most difficult but perhaps the most significant of [these essays] is "What Might Have Been", in which Alan R. White examines the relations of could have, may have, and might have, three concepts which embody aspects of the wider notion of possibility. Professor White notes that the question whether someone could have done other than what he did in fact do is central to the problem of freewill and determinism, just as the question whether something may have or might have happened other than what is believed to have happened is central to the thesis of scepticism. Part of his purpose in writing the essay is to help clarify such problems. Anyone at all interested in possibility or its cognates will benefit not only from White's positive views on the subject, but also from his criticisms of the views of other writers, including G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Norman Malcolm.
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