Philip Ellis Wheelwright (July 6, 1901 – January 6, 1970) [1] was an American philosopher, classical scholar and literary theorist. He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the son of a stockbroker, and died in Santa Barbara, California. Wheelwright was educated at Princeton University, with a B.A. in 1921 and a Ph.D. in 1924 with a dissertation entitled "The Concepts of Liberty and Contingency in the Philosophy of Charles Renouvier," the French Kantian philosopher who so influenced William James.
Wheelwright taught at New York University from 1927 to 1935, while editing from 1930 to 1933 Symposium, an avant-garde review of literary criticism. After two years devoted to his own writing, in 1937 he returned to teaching as professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College, on whose faculty he remained until 1953. In 1966 he retired from the University of California, Riverside, where he had been a professor since 1954, a founding charter member of the faculty of UC Riverside's undergraduate College of Letters and Science (now dubbed the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences). Wheelwright also taught at Pomona College for one semester in 1953. He was known as an eloquent lecturer.[2]
Wheelwright published in 1935 A Critical Introduction to Ethics, an introductory textbook to philosophical ethics; in the same year and for the general public, he published Aristotle, a translation "into the English of today" of selections from seven of the Greek philosopher's most important books: Natural Science, The Metaphysics, Zoology, Psychology, The Nicomachean Ethics, On Statecraft, and The Art of Poetry.
But Professor Wheelwright is best-known for works in the field of literary criticism, The Burning Fountain: a Study in the Language of Symbolism (1954) and Metaphor and Reality (1962).
He also published a book on early Greek philosophy, The Presocratics (1966).
References[edit]
- ^ "Wheelwright, Philip Ellis", in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers in America: From 1600 to the Present, John R. Shook, ed. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016)
- ^ The American Philosophical Society Centennial Series (2013), pp. 415-16.
The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism
by Philip Ellis Wheelwright
3.08 · Rating details · 12 ratings · 1 review
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Andrew
Mar 30, 2016
Andrew rated it it was ok · review of another edition
This study of symbolic language in literature and religion is wide-ranging, but not systematic in a way that I, at least, could keep in mind. Consequently, as I ranged along with Wheelwright, I frequently felt a bit lost, unsure of what the big picture was and where in it we stood.
The key to it all, which was the chief reason of my interest in the book, would seem to be Wheelwright's claim that truly poetic language, through the creation of new meaning, is a mode of apprehending, even of creating, new being (cf. 70-71).
However, it seems to me that the attempt to deliver on that claim, concentrated in the final four pages of the chapter, "Expressive Statement and Truth," amounted to little more than an argument that poetic truth is based on a kind of willing suspension of disbelief in order to participate in the world of a poem and entertain claims of or about that world as true in that world's own terms. Still, the chapter ends with this fine statement: "The ground-bass of poetic truth is the truth, contextual but real, of man's possible redemption through the fullest imaginative response" (205).
For all Wheelwright's provocative turns of phrase, though, I had hoped for something more robust, along the lines of an account of poetic truth as what arises when we assent to let a poem (or other poetic utterance) act to "true" our imagination and our world into conformity with the poem's insight - a tri-polar participation, then. Maybe that's for me to write. (less)
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Rudolph V. Dusek
5.0 out of 5 stars EXCELLENT WORK ON METAPHOR: UNJUSTLY NEGLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2013
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Despite a revival of interest in metaphor in analytic philosophy, from Max Black's and Mary Hesse's earlier work through Donald Davidson and much recent work, Wheelwright's work is neglected because of its non-analytic style. I notice that contemporary accounts of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus don't even deign to mention Wheelwright's work on him, despite the obviously metaphorical nature of so many of Heraclitus' aphorisms. This book deserves to be revived, taken seriously, and utilized by philosophical students of metaphor.
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Mimi
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read
Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2017
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Still a seminal book for anyone who thinks about language and 'reality'. The former library copy, however, had been badly treated.
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