Background
Frankena, William Klaus was born on June 21, 1908 in Montana, United States.
Frankena, William Klaus was born on June 21, 1908 in Montana, United States.
1930, graduated from Calvin College. 1930-1933. University of Michigan. 1933-1937, Harvard University (studied with C. I. Lewis, R. B. Perry, A. NWhitehead).
1935-1936, University of Cambridge (studied with G. E. Moore, C. D. Broad). 1937. PhD, Harvard University.
1937, Instructor, University of Michigan. 1947-1961, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Michigan. Visiting Professor at Pnnceton, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Tokyo.
Guggenheim Fellowship. Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in Behavioural Sciences. Distinguished Achievement Award, University of Michigan.
First Carus Lecturer
(1973) in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Michigan. 1955-1956, President of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division. Retired 1977.
Frankena had a distinguished career as a gifted teacher and as a philosopher working in the mainstream of twentieth-century moral philosophy. Probably his most influential work has been *n the history of moral philosophy and, more generally, through his capacity for analysing and drawing distinctions between important moral concepts such as ‘deontologicaf and ‘teleological’, ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’, etc. This capacity is equally evident in his writing on environmental ethics, where he distinguishes between types of environmental theories and argues for an ethics of the environment that recognizes right and wrong ways of treating beings other than persons that are conscious and sentient. His 1939 paper is a justly famous analysis of the logical and semantic problems attendant on accusations made by G. E. Moore and others concerning the committing by ethical naturalists of the naturalistic fallacy. In his own treatment of the philosophical problems of ethics Frankena argues for a Humean type of ethical objectivity and for an Aristotelian orientation with regard to the virtues. He maintains that to take the moral point of view is to make normative judgements, to be willing to universalize one’s judgements, and to found those judgements on facts about what is good and evil for sentient beings. ‘Morality’, he wrote, ‘is made for man, not man for morality’.