Porter, Noah(1811–1892)
Noah Porter was an American Congregationalist clergyman, philosopher, and psychologist, and president of Yale College from 1871 to 1886. As a student in the Yale Divinity School, Porter had become a disciple of Nathaniel W. Taylor's modified version of New England Calvinism. For ten years he preached Taylorism at churches in New Milford, Connecticut (1836–1843), and Springfield, Massachusetts (1843–1846). He was then appointed Clark professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale, holding this chair throughout his tenure of the presidency of the college. On retiring from the office of president, he resumed a small teaching load until his death.
Porter's thought until 1853 was dominated by the conventional Scottish commonsense realism that pervaded American colleges. Then two years spent in Europe, largely in study at the University of Berlin, increased his familiarity with more recent and more daring philosophical systems. He became particularly interested, through the German philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, in the central epistemological problems of modern philosophy. Porter was convinced that these problems had to be solved before any advance in ontology could be expected. Moreover, he believed that the epistemological questions themselves required a foundation in scientific psychology.
This conviction and a much keener appreciation of the value of the history of thought than was usual among American philosophers of his time, led Porter to the preparation and publication of his important treatise The Human Intellect, the best work on psychology in English before William James. Porter presented and critically examined the leading ideas of both English and European (chiefly German) schools of psychology, as well as summarizing earlier work in the field. Because he regarded psychology as a necessary prelude to epistemology which, in turn, he considered prior to metaphysics, he insisted that psychology had to be an inductive science and roundly criticized G. W. F. Hegel for attempting to ground psychology in his metaphysical system. Although inductive, however, psychology cannot be a material or experimental science. Its subjects are the data of consciousness, which must be discovered introspectively; physiological experiments and investigations must be kept in mind by the psychologist, but these studies are ancillary to the direct study of the data of consciousness.
The influence of this major work and of Porter's many lesser writings was one of the chief forces in liberating academic philosophy in America from domination by naive realism and in introducing the study of German philosophy and psychology.
Among the nonphilosophical activities of Porter, special note should be taken of his editorship, with Chauncey A. Goodrich, of a revised edition of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, MA, 1864). This work was revised under Porter's sole supervision as Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language (1890).
Common Sense; Consciousness; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; James, William; Psychology; Realism.
Bibliography
Works by Porter
The Human Intellect. New York: Scribners, 1868.
The American Colleges and the American Public. New Haven, CT: Chatfield, 1870.
Science and Sentiment. New York: Scribners, 1882.
The Elements of Moral Science. New York: Scribners, 1885.
Kant's Ethics. A Critical Exposition. Chicago: S.C. Griggs, 1886.
Works on Porter
Blau, Joseph L. Men and Movements in American Philosophy. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952.
James, Walter T. The Philosophy of Noah Porter. 1951. An unpublished doctoral dissertation, available in typescript in the Columbia University library.
Merriam, George S., ed. Noah Porter: A Memorial by Friends. New York: Scribners, 1893. Biographical and expository discussion.
Schneider, H. W. A History of American Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Contains additional comment.
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