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Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop (November 27, 1893 in Janesville, Wisconsin – July 21, 1992 in Exeter, New Hampshire) was an American philosopher. After receiving a B.A. from Beloit College in 1915, and an MA from Yale University in 1919, he went on to Harvard University where he earned another MA in 1922 and a Ph.D. in 1924.〔''New York Times'', July 23, 1992. (Obituary )〕 He was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1923 as an instructor in Philosophy, and later was named professor in 1932. In 1947 he was appointed Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law. He chaired the Philosophy department from 1938 to 1940 and was the first Master of Silliman College from 1940 to 1947. Northrop was personally acquainted with and close to a great number of leading figures in philosophy, politics, and science. These included G. H. Hardy, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schroedinger, Hermann Weyl, Norbert Wiener, Mao Zedong, John Foster Dulles and Mohammed Iqbal, among many others. For instance, see the dedication to "Man, Nature, and God." He was the author of twelve books and innumerable articles on all major branches of philosophy. Chapter-length studies of seven of these books can be found in Fred Seddon’s ''An Introduction to the Philosophical Works of F. S. C. Northrop''. ==Ideas== Northrop’s major contribution to philosophy is in the area of epistemology, specifically his theory of concepts. He divides all concepts into two kinds: intuition and postulation. For Northrop, the source of the meaning of the concept is the source of its difference. This can be seen from the definitions of these concepts. A concept by intuition is one which denotes, and the complete meaning of which is given by something that is immediately apprehended. Northrop gives blue in "the sense of the sensed color" as an example of a concept by intuition. (The Logic of Science and Humanities, p. 82.) The other kind is concepts by postulation. A concept by postulation is one the meaning of which in whole or in part is designated by the postulates of the deductive theory in which it occurs. Blue in the sense of the frequency or wavelength in electromagnetic theory is a concept by postulation. (The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 83.) According to Northrop, these two types of concepts exhaust the available concepts (i.e., providing terms with meanings) from which any scientific or philosophical theory can be constructed and therefore provides a means to do comparative philosophy, analyze and solve the problem of world peace, tame nations, provide a philosophical anthropology, explain why economists from Smith to Marx were incapable of providing a dynamics to supplement their statics, and to ground art and religion as well as legal and ethical theory. Northrop substantiates these claims in his ''The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities''. There remains one crucial notion: what is the relationship between postulation and intuition. For Northrop the relation is ''epistemic correlation''. Northrop provides the following definition: (The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 119.) The sensed color blue is related to theoretical color blue by an epistemic correlation. Note what this relation is not. It is not the relation of ''causality'' or ''identity''. Concept-by-postulation blue does not cause concept-by-intuition blue. As Northrop reports in ''Science and First Principles'', (pp. 251–252) concept-by-intuition blue is a multivalued relation. One relatum of concept-by-intuition blue is the angstrom number currently associated with concept by postulation blue. To assume that only one of the relata of a relation could cause that relation is as silly as assuming that the female (or the male) member of a marriage causes the marriage. Nor is the proper relation between postulation and intuition "identity", as can easily been seen using "blue". Concept-by-postulation blue is not identical with concept-by-intuition blue, but is just one among many relata that go to form this complex secondary quality. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「F. S. C. Northrop」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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