Noah Porter
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Noah Porter (December 14, 1811 - March 14, 1892), American educationalist and philosophical writer, was born in Farmington, Connecticut.
He graduated from Yale College in 1831, and was employed as a Congregational minister in Connecticut and Massachusetts, 1836 to 1846. He was elected professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale in 1846, and from 1871 to 1886 he was president of the college. He edited several editions of Webster's Dictionary, and wrote on education. Influenced by the German refugee writer and philosopher Francis Leiber, Porter opposed slavery and integrated an antislavery position with religious liberalism.
He was a frequent visitor to the Adirondack Mountains of New York, and in 1875 was among the first recorded to make an ascent of the peak later named Porter Mountain in his honor. Noah Porter was the older brother of Sarah Porter, founder of Miss Porter's School, a prestigious college preparatory school for girls.
His best-known work is The Human Intellect, with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Human Soul (1868), comprehending a general history of philosophy, and following in part the "common-sense" philosophy of the Scottish school, while accepting the Kantian doctrine of intuition, and declaring the notion of design to be a priori. He died in New Haven.
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Theodore Dwight Woolsey |
President of Yale College 1871–1886 |
Succeeded by Timothy Dwight V |
[edit] Quotations
"What you believe depends strongly on what you are."
[edit] Writings available on-line
- Civil Liberty: A Sermon, from the Antislavery Literature Project
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
