Stephen Pepper

Stephen C. Pepper (April 29, 1891 – May 1, 1972) was an American pragmatist philosopher, the Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He may be best known for World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942) but was also a respected authority on aesthetics, philosophy of art, and ethics.

Stephen Coburn Pepper received his bachelor's degree (1913) and his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University (1916)opragmatist. He taught primarily at the University of California at Berkeley, from 1919 to 1953. He may be best known for World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942), in which he presented four relatively adequate world hypotheses (or world views or conceptual systems) in terms of their root metaphors: formism (similarity), mechanism (machine), contextualism (historical act), and organicism (living system). However, Pepper was also a respected authority on aesthethics, philosophy of art, and ethics, publishing a dozen books and more than a hundred articles. At the University of California he served as chair of the art department and, subsequently, as chair of the philosophy department. Pepper was the Mills Professor of Philosophy, an endowed chair.

External links

• Stephen C. Pepper Papers, 1903-1972 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Special Collections Research Center