William A. Earle (1919 – October 16, 1988) was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Earle was an important figure within the movements of existentialism and phenomenology. He had particular expertise in the thought of Karl Jaspers and Georg W. F. Hegel and was an authority on surrealism. His interests included cultural criticism, the history of ideas, aesthetics, film, filmmaking, and mysticism. Students and colleagues regarded him as a strikingly independent, richly provocative educator and thinker.

Life

Earle was born in Saginaw, Michigan. After service in World War II, he studied at the University of Aix-Marseilles under Gaston Berger and at the University of Chicago under Charles Hartshorne and received PhDs from both institutions. From 1948 to 1982 he taught philosophy at Northwestern University, with visiting lectureships at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. In 1962 Earle, along with John Daniel Wild, James M. Edie, and others, founded the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. William Earle died in Evanston, Illinois.

Philosophy

Earle's thought is infused with an appreciation of the singularity of human existences and with a sensibility that is both aesthetic and ethical. He wrote that he considered his books Objectivity (1955), The Autobiographical Consciousness (1972), and Mystical Reason (1980) as a continuous set of works in which one idea is examined from three successive points of view. In Objectivity he defended the objectivity of the being of the phenomenological object. In The Autobiographical Consciousness he explored the phenomenological subject, the "I" or self conceived both as an embodied existence and as transcendental. And in Mystical Reason he argued, in a "strictly philosophical" way, that the transcendental ego is identical with absolute being or God himself, proposing that there is a kind of mysticism at the core of all truly rational philosophy.

Quotations from Earle's works

On the objective reality of the world

On human nature and human life

On value theory and ethics

On literature

On God and truth

Major works

Books

Translations

Secondary works