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Stephen C. Pepper (April 29, 1891–May 1, 1972) was an American philosopher.

Career

For a time, he held the chair of both the philosophy and art departments at the same time at the University of California. He worked and wrote primarily in the tradition of pragmatism. While his ideas join a number of important issues in modern thought (e.g. social sources of knowledge, mind, logic, ethics, valuation) and his principal work was in aesthetics, he is probably best known for his book, World Hypotheses: a study in evidence (U. of California Press, 1942).^[1] In it, Pepper develops a "root metaphor method" and outlines what he considers to be four basically adequate world hypotheses (world views or conceptual systems): formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism. He identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each of the world hypotheses as well as the paradoxical and sometimes mystifying effects of the effort to synthesize them. ^[1]

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Index

• http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/Index.htm
• http://people.sunyit.edu/~harrell/Pepper/pep_efron.htm