Philip Whitehead Goetz (1927 – October 1, 2008[1]) was the Executive Editor (under Chief Editor Warren E. Preece) for the first version of the 15th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
[2] More importantly, he was the Chief Editor for the second version of the 15th edition, which was a massive revision and re-organization of the Britannica.
Goetz, who obtained a B.S.
from Northwestern University in 1950 and joined Britannica in 1952, served as Chief Editor from 1979 to 1991.
He is given critical acclaim for making the second version a much more useful encyclopedia, moving it away from the epistemological preconceptions of Mortimer J.