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Norman Adrian Malcolm (; 11 June 1911 – 4 August 1990) was an American philosophy. Malcolm was primarily active in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology.
At Cambridge University in 1938–9, he met G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Malcolm attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophy foundations of mathematics throughout 1939 and remained one of Wittgenstein's closest friends. Malcolm's 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, Malcolm, with his wife, Leonida, and their son, Raymond Charles Malcolm, resided in Cambridge again in 1946–1947. He saw a good deal of Wittgenstein during that time, and they continued to correspond frequently thereafter. In 1947, Malcolm joined the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where he taught until his retirement. In 1949, Wittgenstein was a guest of the Malcolms in Ithaca, New York. In that year Malcolm introduced O. K. Bouwsma to Wittgenstein. Bouwsma remained close to Wittgenstein until Wittgenstein's death in 1951.
Malcolm was a Fulbright research fellow at University of Helsinki during the academic year of 1960-1961. From 1972-1973 he was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and in 1975 joined the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Malcolm lived in London for the last 12 years of his life where he was appointed as a visiting professor and, shortly before his death, a fellow at King’s College London. previously
He died there in 1990.
Other than that he is known for propagating the view that common sense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy are the same. He was generally supportive of Moore's theory of knowledge and certitude, though he found Moore's style and method of arguing to be ineffective.Norman Malcolm (1952), "Moore and Ordinary Language", The Philosophy of G. E. Moore His critique of Moore's articles on skepticism (and also on Moore's 'Here is a hand' argument) lay the foundation for the renewed interest in common sense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy.Scott Soames (2003) "Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II: The Age of Meaning." Chapter 7 He was among the most important and influential of the ordinary-language philosophers in the United States.
Malcolm was also a defender of a Modal logic version of the ontological argument. In 1960 he argued that the argument originally presented by Anselm of Canterbury in the second chapter of his Proslogion was just an inferior version of the argument propounded in chapter three.Norman Malcolm (1960), "Anselm's Ontological Arguments," Philosophical Review, 69:41–62. His argument is similar to those produced by Charles Hartshorne and Alvin Plantinga. Malcolm argued that a God cannot simply exist as a matter of contingency but rather must exist in necessity if at all. He argued that if God exists in contingency then his existence is subject to a series of conditions that would then be greater than God and this would be a contradiction (referring to Anselm's definition of God as That than which Nothing Greater can be Conceived).
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Categories: 1911 Births, 1990 Deaths, 20th-century American Episcopalians, 20th-century American Philosophers, 20th-century American Historians, American Male Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century American Memoirists, Analytic Philosophers, Anglican Philosophers, Cornell University Faculty, American Epistemologists, Harvard University Alumni, Ontologists, Ordinary Language Philosophy, People From Sheridan County, Kansas, American Philosophers Of Education, American Philosophers Of Language, American Philosophers Of Mind, American Philosophers Of Religion, American Philosophers Of Social Science, American Philosophy Academics, United States Navy Sailors, University Of Nebraska–lincoln Alumni, Wittgensteinian Philosophers, Philosophers Of Psychology, Fellows Of The American Academy Of Arts And Sciences
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