Norman Malcolm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Western philosophy 20th Century |
|
|---|---|
| Name: | Norman Malcolm |
| Birth: | 1911 |
| Death: | 1990 |
| School/tradition: | Analytic Philosophy |
| Main interests: | Philosophy of mind |
| Notable ideas: | The memoir and legacy of Wittgenstein, criticism of commonsense dreams |
| Influences: | Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, René Descartes |
| Influenced: | Oets Kolk (O.K.) Bouwsma |
Norman Malcolm (1911 – 1990) was an American philosopher. He was born in Selden, Kansas. After earning a Harvard doctorate, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1940.
During his first term at Cambridge in 1938, he met Ludwig Wittgenstein and attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophical foundations of mathematics throughout 1939. Malcolm remained one of Wittgenstein's closest friends, and his 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, he spent most of his remaining American career at Cornell University (1947-1958), then emigrated to Britain. In 1949, Malcolm introduced O.K. Bouwsma to Wittgenstein. Bouwsma was close with Wittgenstein until Wittgenstein died in 1951.
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.[1]
His works include:
- Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir
- Wittgenstein: A Religious Point Of View?
- Nothing Is Hidden: Wittgenstein's criticism of his early thought
- Problems of Mind: Descartes to Wittgenstein
- Knowledge and Certainty
- Consciousness and Causality (with D. M. Armstrong)
- Memory and Mind
- Dreaming and Skepticism
- Wittgenstein: The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour (J.R.Jones Memorial Lecture) Publisher: University of Wales, Swansea (Dec 1981) ISBN-10: 0860760243
- Thought and knowledge
- Wittgensteinian themes (edited by Georg Henrik von Wright) and Dreaming.
