Noah Porter

Noah Porter
President of Yale University
Term	1871 – 1886
Predecessor	Theodore Dwight Woolsey
Successor	Timothy Dwight V
Born	December 14, 1811(1811-12-14) Farmington, Connecticut
Died	March 4, 1892(1892-03-04) (aged 80) New Haven, Connecticut
Alma mater	Yale College

Noah Porter, Jr. (December 14, 1811 – March 4, 1892) was an American academic, philosopher, author, lexicographer and President of Yale College (1871–1886).^[1]

Biography

He graduated from Yale College in 1831 and was ordained as a Congregational minister in New Milford, Connecticut from 1836 to 1843. He served as pastor at a Congregational Church in Springfield, Massachusetts from 1843 to 1846.^[2] He was elected professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale in 1846.

Porter was inaugurated as President of Yale College on Wednesday, October 11, 1871.^[3] He continued to serve as head of the college until 1886

Porter edited several editions of Webster's Dictionary, and wrote on education.

Influenced by the German refugee writer and philosopher Francis Leiber, Porter opposed slavery and integrated an antislavery position with religious liberalism.

He was a frequent visitor to the Adirondack Mountains of New York, and in 1875 was among the first recorded to make an ascent of the peak later named Porter Mountain in his honor. Noah Porter, Jr. was the son of Noah Porter, one of the first ministers of First Church of Christ, Congregational 1652 in Farmington, Connecticut, and was the older brother of Sarah Porter, founder of Miss Porter's School, a college preparatory school for girls.^[4]

His best-known work is The Human Intellect, with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Human Soul (1868), comprehending a general history of philosophy, and following in part the "common-sense" philosophy of the Scottish school, while accepting the Kantian doctrine of intuition, and declaring the notion of design to be a priori. Of great importance were two other works, Elements of Intellectual Science (1871) and Elements of Moral Science (1885).

He died in New Haven.

Quotations

• "What you believe depends strongly on what you are."

Notes

See also: Ivy League Presidents

1. ^ Welch, Lewis et al. (1899). Yale, Her Campus, Class-rooms, and Athletics, p. 445.
2. ^ [1]
3. ^ Addresses at the Inauguration of Professor Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D., as President of Yale College,p. 3.
4. ^ [2]

References

• Kelley, Brooks Mather. (1999). Yale: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press. 10-ISBN 0-300-07843-9: 13-ISBN 978-0-300-07843-5; OCLC 810552
• Levesque, George. “Noah Porter Revisited,” History of Higher Education Annual, 26 (2007), 29–66.
• Welch, Lewis Sheldon and Walter Camp. (1899). Yale, Her Campus, Class-rooms, and Athletics. Boston: L. C. Page and Co. OCLC 2191518

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• Civil Liberty: A Sermon, from the Antislavery Literature Project
• The Human Intellect: With an Introduction upon Psychology and the Soul via Google Books.
• Peirce, C. S. (1869), "Professor Porter's Human Intellect" (review), The Nation 8, 211-13 (March 18, 1869). Peirce Edition Project Eprint.

Academic offices
Preceded by Theodore Dwight Woolsey	President of Yale College 1871–1886	Succeeded by Timothy Dwight V

Persondata
Name	Porter, Noah
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	December 14, 1811
Place of birth	unknown
Date of death	March 4, 1892
Place of death	New Haven, Connecticut