An Introduction To Philosophy & A Handbook of Ethical Theory
(• Two of philosopher and psychology Professor George Stua...)
• Two of philosopher and psychology Professor George Stuart Fullerton's books are bound together in this Kindle book: An Introduction To Philosophy (1906) and A Handbook of Ethical Theory (1922)
What are the meaning of words? How do psychology and philosophy.overlap? These and other questions are explored by American author George Stuart Fullerton
About The Author
Fullerton (1859–1925) was an academic and former prisoner of war. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale Divinity School. He died at age 66.
(This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)
This book was digitized and reprinted from the collections of the University of California Libraries. It was produced from digital images created through the libraries’ mass digitization efforts. The digital images were cleaned and prepared for printing through automated processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found online in the HathiTrust Digital Library at www.hathitrust.org.
(William James, American psychologist and philosopher, was...)
William James, American psychologist and philosopher, was mainly known by his works on The Principles of Psychology and the Pragmatism. --- Everyone is now acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory… The theory maintains that in everything outward we are pure material machines. Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging. The theory also maintains that we are in error to suppose that our thoughts awaken each other by inward congruity or rational necessity, that disappointed hopes cause sadness, premisses conclusions, etc... The feelings are merely juxtaposed in that order without mutual cohesion, because the nerve-processes to which they severally correspond awaken each other in that order. It may seem strange that this latter part of the theory should be held by writers, who have openly expressed their belief in Hume's doctrine of causality. That doctrine asserts that the causality we seem to find between the terms of a physical chain of events, is an illegitimate outward projection of the inward necessity by which we feel each thought to sprout out of its customary antecedent. Strip the string of necessity from between ideas themselves, and it becomes hard indeed for a Humian to say how the notion of causality ever was born at all. Are We Automata?
George Stuart Fullerton was an American philosopher, author, professor. He developed that method of presenting philosophy which was less a lecture- form than a marvelously skillful adaptation of the classic “Socratic questioning".
Background
George Stuart Fullerton was one of seven children born to the Rev. Robert Stewart and Martha (White) Fullerton during their fifteen-year residence in India as missionaries. The American Fullertons are descended through Humphrey who about 1727, settled at Pequea, Pennsylvania, from a long line of Covenanters.
From the marriage of Thomas, great-grandson of this Humphrey, with Elizabeth Stewart of Maryland, came that Robert Stewart who immediately after his wedding with Martha, daughter of the Rev. Robert White of Faggs Manor, Pennsylvania, set sail with his bride for India.
A recent memoir, Robert Stewart Fullerton, Letters and Narratives of Mutiny Days, recalls the horrors of the Indian Mutiny (1857), and the part played by this missionary family in the dangerous work of reconstruction. It was in no quiet times that their sixth child, George Stuart was born to them at the cantonment station, Fatehgarh.
Six months later, the mother, newly widowed, returned with her four daughters and two surviving sons to America.
Education
Fullerton graduated in 1879 from the University of Pennsylvania and in 1884 from Yale Divinity School.
Career
Fullerton’s early career conformed closely to a family tradition which in his own generation returned two daughters to India and sent two sons into the ministry. Not until his twenty-fifth year did the theologian yield to the philosopher in Fullerton, who having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, pursued graduate studies at Princeton and Yale, was licensed to preach by a Presbyterian body and was later ordained to the Protestant Episcopal ministry.
In 1883, however, giving final expression to interests which had been forming throughout his student years, he accepted an instructorship in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Here, in the course of the next twenty years, he developed that method of presenting philosophy which was less a lecture- form than a marvelously skillful adaptation of the classic “Socratic questioning. ”
The thought in which these years culminated did not appear in systematic form till the moment of their close, yet the minor works produced were neither few nor unimportant; their topics range through mathematics, theology, philosophy, psychology, historical interpretation.
The ordering of such rich material into an organic whole demanded leisure for consecutive thought, but the more Fullerton became known in the academic world the more this leisure was denied him.
Dean of the Graduate School and vice-provost from 1894 to 1896, he retained the latter office till 1898, when it became clear that only release from its heavy responsibilities would permit him to resume his philosophic work.
In 1903, therefore, he resigned his Seybert professorship at Pennsylvania and accepted at Columbia a research professorship which conveyed the privilege of dividing his time between lecture-semesters at home and leisure-intervals abroad.
Thus it happens that the System, published during the first year of his new professorship, presents the fruit of long labors in the old; but it happens, too, that its purport makes it no less a promise of things to come than a consummation of things gone before. It conveniently divides the philosopher’s development into two periods.
Taking these two periods together, his thought may be said to have found its beginnings in a Berkeleyan Idealism, its end in a New Realism.
Appointed to represent Columbia as first exchange professor to Austria in 1913-14, he chose as the subject of his Vienna lecture course “A Realistic Philosophy of Experience” the opening of which, given important place by the Wiener Abendblatt of the day, is reported to have found ausserordentlichen Beifall; and at its close Fullerton received at the hands of the Emperor the unusual distinction of nomination to an honorary professorship in the University of Vienna.
At Munich, he and Mrs. Fullerton were caught by the outbreak of the war, and here they were held till its close, with such consequences to the frail health of the philosopher as seem to have left him little strength for the more severe efforts of thought.
On his return to America in 1918, his lectures at Vassar retained all their charm. His one volume of this period is unpretentious in scope, A Handbook of Ethical Theory (1922). Not long after this, his familiar letters begin to speak of “a tired mind in a tired body. ” Throughout his active life, a masterful spirit had compelled to its service a machine little equal to the demands made on it.
In his sixty-sixth year, at his home in Poughkeepsie, he took his own life.
Achievements
George Stuart Fullerton was the host of the first annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1892 at the University of Pennsylvania, and the APA's fifth president, in 1896.
Fullerton early writings represent knowledge as setting out with “subjective data” and acquiring with experience “beliefs”.
From the skeptical implications of this philosophy Fullerton felt himself to have escaped when in the System he showed why the “elements of experience, ” with which all science must begin, are no more to be called “subjective” than “objective, ” since they become one or the other according to as they are regarded as moments in the history of a mind, or aspects of an object observed.
But if in 1904, this thought brought with it little more than a sense of escape from Idealism, by 1912, in The World We Live In, it had become an aggressive realism of the type its proponents of that day called “New”: the “ideas, ” of which the earlier philosophy had supposed the world of experience to be composed, could only be called “ideas” by one already in possession of a physical world-order to which he might refer in locating mental states.
In arriving at this insight, Fullerton had no doubt put behind him certain historic errors; but no doubt, too, he looked upon this somewhat negative result as but a clearing of the ground for new constructions. World events defeated his private plans.
Connections
In 1884, Fullerton married Miss Rebekah Daingerfield Smith of Alexandria, Virginia, who died in 1892.
On March 8, 1897, he married Julia Winslow Dickerson of Philadelphia, his widow. There were no children.
