William K. Frankena
| William Frankena | |
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William Frankena in 1949
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| Born |
June 21, 1908 Manhattan, Montana, U.S. |
| Died | October 22, 1994 (aged 86) Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. |
| Alma mater |
Calvin College University of Michigan |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
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Main interests
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Ethics |
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Influences
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William Klaas Frankena (June 21, 1908 – October 22, 1994) was an American moral philosopher. He was a member of the University of Michigan's department of philosophy for 41 years (1937–1978), and chair of the department for 14 years (1947–1961).
Frankena's father and mother immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers, in 1892 and 1896 respectively, from Friesland, a province in the north of the Netherlands. William Frankena was the middle of three children. He was born in Manhattan, Montana, grew up in small Dutch communities in Montana and western Michigan, and spoke Frisian and Dutch. In primary school, his given name, Wiebe, was Anglicized to William. Throughout his life, his family and friends called him Bill. His mother died when he was nine years old. He graduated from Holland Christian High School in Holland, MI, in 1926. After farming, his father, Nicholas A. Frankena (1875–1955), devoted the later decades of his life to elected office in Zeeland, MI, where he was mayor, and to service as an elder in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, which was founded by Calvinist Dutch immigrants.
In 1930, Frankena received a B.A. with majors in English and philosophy from Calvin College, a liberal arts college of the Christian Reformed Church. At Calvin, Frankena studied with William Harry Jellema (1893–1982). Frankena then earned an M.A. from the University of Michigan (1931), where the Department of Philosophy included C. Harold Langford(1895–1964), Dewitt H. Parker (1885–1949), and Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973). Next Frankena earned a second M.A. and a Ph.D. (1937) at Harvard University. He studied with C. I. Lewis, Ralph Barton Perry, and Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard, and with G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad at the University of Cambridge in England while he did Ph.D. research. His doctoral dissertation, which focused on Moore's work, was entitled "Recent Intuitionism in British Ethics." Frankena became well known in the profession with his first published paper, "The Naturalistic Fallacy," Mind, 1939. During World War II, Frankena taught American history at the University of Michigan.
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