Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Franklin Merrell-Wolff joined rigorous philosophical inquiry with first-person accounts of contemplative experience. An American philosopher and former mathematics teacher, he studied philosophy at Harvard and briefly taught mathematics at Stanford. Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Experience and Philosophy brings together his record of transformation, his Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, and Pathways Through to Space. State University of New York Press published the collected volume, placing his account within a broader discussion of transcendental consciousness. Merrell-Wolff left academic work to pursue questions that he believed ordinary sense perception and abstract reasoning could not settle. His later lectures and recordings continued to examine knowledge, identity, and the relation between philosophical systems and direct realization. The Franklin Merrell-Wolff Fellowship preserves biographical material and archival recordings connected with that work.