Morton White

Morton White (born Morton Gabriel Weisberger, April 29, 1917 – May 27, 2016) was an American philosopher and historian of ideas. He was a proponent of a doctrine he called "holistic pragmatism" (a variant of pragmatism) and also a noted scholar of American intellectual history. He was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard from 1953 to 1970. He was Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he served as Professor in the School of Historical Studies from 1970 until he retired in 1987. White was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. He attended City College of New York as an undergraduate before doing his postgraduate studies at Columbia University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1942 under Ernest Nagel. In 1949 he published "Social Thought in America", a critical history of liberal social philosophy. At Harvard, White was a colleague of Willard Van Orman Quine, and the philosophical views of the two are closely related, particularly in their rejection of a sharp distinction between a priori and empirical statements. White died at the age of 99 in Montgomery, New Jersey.