American philosopher (1902–1972)
John Daniel Wild (April 10, 1902 – October 23, 1972) was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Wild began his philosophical career as an empiricist and realist but became an important proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in the United States.[1]
Life and career
Wild was born in Chicago, Illinois. After undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, he received his master's degree from Harvard University and completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1926.[2]
He taught for a year at the University of Michigan and then at Harvard from 1927 until 1961 when he left to assume the chairmanship of the philosophy department at Northwestern University, a leading center for phenomenology and existentialism in the United States. Wild moved to Yale in 1963 and, in 1969, to the University of Florida.
He received an honorary doctorate from Ripon College and served as visiting professor at the Universities of Chicago, Hawaii, and Washington. He served as president of the Association for Realistic Philosophy (1949) and the Metaphysical Society of America (1954). In 1962 Wild, along with William A. Earle, James M. Edie, and others, founded the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.
John Wild died in New Haven, Connecticut.[3]
