Frank Ebersole

Initially Ebersole was interested in philosophers who brought a zoological 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 practised by his teacher Rudolf Carnap). In the early 1950s he read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations, and this changed his direction considerably:

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.

Frank B. Ebersole was born in Indiana. He majored in zoology at Heidelberg College (now Heidelberg University (Ohio)). After years as a philosophy graduate student at Yale University, he transferred to the University of Chicago, where he worked with Rudolf Carnap, one of 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 (He also won the 1945 Fiske Poetry Prize). His dissertation was entitled "Biology and the theory of knowledge : an analytical method for the theory of knowledge, and its relation to biological laws." The thesis contains 7 chapters: I. Determination of the subject and Method II. Relations of Truth and Knowledge: Logic and Epistemology III. The Order of Knowledge and the Phenomenally Given IV. Causal Deliverances in the Given, and the Memory Premiss V. Analysis and the A Priori VI. Special Problems Concerning Memory; Polemic and; VII. Summary of the Main Argument. The thesis starts with general discussion of theory of knowledge (epistemology) and how knowledge must be founded in the "phenomenally given" on page 48 it states, "Here we have if anywhere the foundation of the order of knowledge, in knowledge of the phenomenally given." From that point, Ebersole goes on to examine memory in Ch. IV and the relationship of Biology to questions in theory of knowledge. Ending with problems of memory concerning other areas of philosophy and science. Ebersole later directly challenges these ideas concerning memory and the "phenomenally given" in his book, "Things We Know."

Frank B. Ebersole (1919–2009) was an American philosopher who developed a unique form of ordinary language philosophy.