Oregon State University
News and Communication Services

11-27-96
By Mark Floyd, 541-737-0788
SOURCE: Mary Jo Nye, 541-737-1308

CORVALLIS - Theodore M. Porter, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, will give a free public lecture at Oregon State University on Dec. 3 entitled "Positivist Philosophy and the Evidence of Things."

The lecture is part of an OSU lecture and colloquia series called "What We Know to Be True: Argument and Evidence." It will begin at 4 p.m. in Memorial Union Room 206.

Porter has a bachelor's degree from Stanford and a Ph.D from Princeton, and he has held both Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowships.

His lecture will discuss the "positivist" philosophy espoused by English mathematician Karl Pearson and its surprising ties to the theories of Cardinal John Henry Newman on the question of the limitations of sensory evidence.

The lecture is sponsored by the Thomas Hart and Mary Jones Horning Endowment in the Humanities at OSU, and the Department of History.