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Frank B. Ebersole is an American philosopher who developed a unique form of ordinary language philosophy which, when used to investigate a philosophical problem, can undermine the problem.

Biography
Frank B. Ebersole was born in 1919 in Indiana. He majored in zoology at Heidelberg College. After several years as a philosophy graduate student at Yale University, he transferred to the University of Chicago, where he worked with Rudolph Carnap, one the founders of logical analysis, and with Charles Hartshorne, an advocate of process philosophy and a theorist of physiological psychology. Ebersole received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1947 (and won the Fiske Poetry Prize).

Ebersole taught philosophy at a number of universities (e.g., San José, Stanford, and Alberta) and colleges (e.g., Carleton and Oberlin), but most of his academic career was at the University of Oregon, where he was department chairman and director of graduate studies. He has published essays in journals (e.g., Mind, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy Today, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophical Investigations). However, many of his essays were not intended for journal publication and are available only in his three books: Things We Know, Meaning and Saying, and Language and Perception. Ebersole’s essays give form to personal struggles with philosophical problems.

Professor Ebersole has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, was President of the Willamette Valley Philosophical Association, and serves on the Advisory Editorial Board of the philosophy journal, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell Publishers, Oxford).

Besides his involvement with philosophical issues, he has been a parent, a photographer, a birder, and has written two books of poetry (Many Times of Year and Song of the Crow ).

Philosophy
Initially Ebersole was interested in philosophers who brought a biological perspective to their philosophy (Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne, for example). He also was influenced by ideas of logical analysis (especially as practiced by his teacher Rudolph Carnap). In the early 1950s he read Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations:

Like many another I was once committed to a certain type of philosophical endeavor—a type that goes under the names of "linguistic analysis" or "conceptual analysis." . . . Then I read Wittgenstein. My first reaction was to add footnotes to the things I had been writing. Then I added appendices. Finally I tore the things up; and I have been trying in various ways ever since to overcome a state of paralysis. By the later 1950s Ebersole found a new way in philosophy, partly stimulated by the thinking of Wittgenstein and the writings of other early ordinary language philosophers. In 1957 he read his first paper based on his new thinking; it was about Descartes' dream argument. The paper was published in 1959 in Mind.

As his new thinking became increasingly fruitful, he also concluded that other ordinary language philosophers had failed to grasp the real philosophical value of directing philosophers’ attention to ordinary language.

Ebersole’s work from his mature period (available in his three books) "requires—and often succeeds in producing—a radical reorientation of one's thinking." In most of Ebersole’s essays he starts by removing encrustations from traditional philosophical ideas so that he can identify and address the central issues underlying a philosophical problem and do so from a personal—an internalized—point of view. Often he contrasts the philosophical conceptions of words that are central to a philosophical problem with points these same words can be used to make in the contexts of ordinary (non-philosophical) discourse. Reflections on multiple examples that include words of interest spoken with point in ordinary speech contexts reveal significant differences between the ways we think when we are in the grip of a philosophical problem and when we are not so gripped. Ebersole concludes that such philosophical investigations reveal that philosophical problems often arise from philosophers’ tendency to think in terms of philosophical “pictures.”

He has written mainly on topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. He reflects on such philosophical issues as skepticism (about the past, the future, and the external world), fatalism, determinism, the existence of sense-data, the validity of the ontological argument, and whether language shapes perception. His essays bring out the oddity of philosophical conceptions of knowledge, causes, perception, human action, bodies, properties, existence, colors, sounds, dreams, propositions, hallucinations, interpretation, truth, logic, tautologies, meaning (in language), saying, speech acts, names, understanding (in language), pain, memory, perfection, seeing stars, and one-day-old worlds. In addition, Ebersole argues in several essays that two main critics of ordinary language philosophy (Paul Grice and John R. Searle ) beg questions raised by the robust form of ordinary language philosophy he practiced.

In sum, Ebersole’s work aims to expose “pictures” that stimulate much philosophical thought. His contribution to philosophy has been characterized as “the greatest of anyone [in the 20th] century, especially in the areas of philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, and perception." His writing is unconventional in style and content, as he acknowledges in this excerpt from one of his poems:

People stopped and puzzled when I talked,

wondered how to think about

anything I said.

If I made people ask themselves

what of heads or tails to make

of a philosopher's talk,

that was a good thing that I did,

I would say....