Norman Malcolm
Encyclopedia
Norman Malcolm was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

, born in Selden, Kansas
Selden, Kansas
Selden is a city in Sheridan County, Kansas, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 219.-Geography:Selden is located at . According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , all of it land.-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 201...

. He studied philosophy with O.K. Bouwsma at the University of Nebraska, then enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1933.

At Cambridge University in 1938/1939, he met G. E. Moore
George Edward Moore
George Edward Moore OM, was an English philosopher. He was, with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of the analytic tradition in philosophy...

 and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

. Malcolm attended Wittgenstein's lectures on the philosophical
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 foundations of mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 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
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...

 from 1942 to 1945, Malcolm, with his wife, Leonida, and their son, Raymond Charles Malcolm, resided in Cambridge again in 1946-47. He saw a good deal of Wittgenstein during that time, and they continued to correspond frequently thereafter. In 1947, Malcolm joined the faculty at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

, 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.

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.http://auden.webster.edu/~sekosha/pastor.htm

Other than that he is known for propagating the view that common sense
Common sense
Common sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." Thus, "common sense" equates to the knowledge and experience which most people already have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have...

 philosophy and ordinary language philosophy are the same. He was generally supportive of Moore's
George Edward Moore
George Edward Moore OM, was an English philosopher. He was, with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of the analytic tradition in philosophy...

 theory of knowledge and certitude, though he found Moore's style and method of arguing to be ineffective. His critique of Moore's articles on skepticism (and also on Moore's 'Here is a hand
Here is a hand
Here is a hand is the name of a philosophical argument created by George Edward Moore against philosophical skepticism and in support of common sense:* This is a hand.* Here is another hand.* There are at least two external objects in the world....

' argument) lay the foundation for the renewed interest in common sense philosophy and ordinary language philosoph
Ordinary language philosophy
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical school that approaches traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use....

y.

Malcolm was also a defender of a modal
Modal logic
Modal logic is a type of formal logic that extends classical propositional and predicate logic to include operators expressing modality. Modals — words that express modalities — qualify a statement. For example, the statement "John is happy" might be qualified by saying that John is...

 version of the ontological argument
Ontological argument
The ontological argument for the existence of God is an a priori argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument was first proposed by the eleventh-century monk Anselm of Canterbury, who defined God as the greatest possible being we can conceive...

. In 1960 he argued that the argument originally presented by Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury , also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109...

 in the second chapter of his Proslogion
Proslogion
The Proslogion, , written in 1077-1078, was written as a prayer, or meditation, by the medieval cleric Anselm which serves to reflect on the attributes of God and endeavours to explain how God can have qualities which often seem contradictory...

was just an inferior version of the argument propounded in chapter three. His argument is similar to those produced by Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne was a prominent American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument...

 and Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...

.

His works include:
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir
  • Moore and Ordinary Language
  • 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 0860760243
  • Thought and knowledge
  • Wittgensteinian themes (edited by Georg Henrik von Wright
    Georg Henrik von Wright
    Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher, who succeeded Ludwig Wittgenstein as professor at the University of Cambridge. He published in English, Finnish, German, and in Swedish. Belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland, von Wright also had Finnish and 17th-century Scottish...

    ) and Dreaming.

See also

"Norman Malcolm: A Memoir," Anthony Serafini, in the journal PHILOSOPHY, published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy, 68:265265,
309-324, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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