Deceased--Paul Kurtz

Paul Kurtz
December 21st, 1925 to October 20th, 2012

 
"Philosopher, secular humanist and religion skeptic Paul Kurtz dies at 86 in New York"

October 22nd, 2012

Associated Press

Paul Kurtz, who sought to debunk psychics, astrologers and anything related to the paranormal, has died. He was 86.

The secular humanist philosopher died Saturday at his home in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst. His death was announced Monday by the Center for Inquiry, which he founded. His family isn’t releasing the cause.

Kurtz founded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which advocates relying on science and reason to examine everything from alien sightings to homeopathic remedies.

He also was a well-known voice for the idea that decisions and behavior should be guided by science and reason over religion.

A World War II veteran, Kurtz earned a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University and taught philosophy at several colleges.

"Paul Kurtz dies at 86; secular humanist philosopher"

Kurtz, who taught philosophy, saw secular humanism as a way to encourage people to find wisdom, happiness and moral awareness without a god.

by

Elaine Woo

October 28th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Philosopher Paul Kurtz was called many unflattering names during his long career, including "Satanic free-thinker" and "dangerous corrupter of young minds."

But the name some of his critics considered most damning was the one he most prized.

They called him a secular humanist.

"You can call me a skeptic, a non-theist, an atheist, an agnostic, a skeptical, agnostic atheist, but the best term," Kurtz, a champion of science and debunker of religions and the supernatural, told the Associated Press years ago, "is secular humanist. I have a philosophy, a point of view, and I express it."

Kurtz, a forceful leader of the secular humanism movement that holds human freedom and creativity supreme, died Oct. 20 at his home in Amherst, N.Y. He was 86.

His son Jonathan said Kurtz had heart problems but declined to give an exact cause of death.

Kurtz taught philosophy at State University of New York at Buffalo for 26 years but was not an ivory tower recluse. An admirer of pragmatist John Dewey, he "wanted to bring philosophy from the ivory tower and deliver it to people," his son said. This stance led Kurtz to create the magazines Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry, the journal Human Prospect and the publishing company Prometheus Books.

He also founded several organizations, the most prominent being the 21-year-old Center for Inquiry, a New York-based group dedicated to fostering a society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry and humanist values.

Kurtz, who grew up with a Jewish background, criticized religion but was more than an atheist. He viewed secular humanism as a positive philosophy that encourages people to find wisdom, happiness and moral awareness without God, by improving life for oneself and others in the here and now. He coined the term Eupraxsophy to describe a nonreligious approach to life.

"No god will save us," he declared as principal author of the Humanist Manifesto II, a 1973 document signed by such prominent thinkers as philosopher Sidney Hook, writer Isaac Asimov and scientist Francis Crick, "we must save ourselves."

Nor did Kurtz believe in parapsychology, extraterrestrials, the effectiveness of chiropractic, Bigfoot or other phenomena that seem to defy scientific explanation. He assembled panels of experts to submit the most mystifying claims to critical scrutiny through the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which he founded in 1976 with magician James Randi and others. It reports on its investigations in Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

"He was the greatest free thought leader in America since the passing of John Dewey," said Stuart Jordan, a former NASA scientist and president of the Institute for Science and Human Values, which Kurtz launched in 2010 after resigning his positions at the Center for Inquiry because of irreconcilable differences with its leadership.

In 2008, when he was nearing 82, he supported the decision of the Center for Inquiry board to hire Washington, D.C., attorney Ronald A. Lindsay as chief executive. Kurtz clashed with the new chief over personnel changes and what he perceived as a wrong-headed turn away from humanism to "angry atheism."

Although he wasn't above such antics as Skeptical Inquirer's "Foot in Mouth Disease Award" (which went to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 2002 for blaming the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in part on feminists, pagans and abortionists), Kurtz was dismayed by Lindsay's leadership, citing in particular his support of International Blasphemy Rights Day with contests for cartoons and slogans illustrating forms of blasphemy. Kurtz found the whole affair sophomoric and gimmicky.

"Paul was very tolerant and open-minded," said Jordan, who also has served as the center's science advisor, "but because he raised the money, once the dialogue was over he acted a little more like a field marshal.... There aren't many entrepreneurs who have not been a little like that — intense, passionate people who have good ideas and an understandable tendency to say, 'Let's do it my way.'"

Kurtz was born in Newark, N.J., on Dec. 31, 1925, the son of a free-thinking businessman and a homemaker. He was not raised Jewish and for a time affiliated with the Unitarian Church. He left when he realized "you can lead a good life without being a member of a church," according to a 1987 Chicago Tribune interview.

He enlisted in the Army at 17 and fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Later he met survivors of Nazi brutality at the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, a searing experience. Throughout the war he carried a copy of Plato's Republic, the classic dialogue on the meaning of justice.

After the war he studied philosophy at New York University under Hook, a student of Dewey who became a prominent philosopher of the pragmatist school. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 before obtaining his master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy at Columbia, in 1949 and 1952. He taught at Trinity College in Connecticut before returning to New York for appointments at Vassar College and Union College. He joined SUNY Buffalo in 1965 and retired in 1991.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Claudine; three daughters and five grandchildren.

He wrote or edited more than 45 books, the last of which is a work on planetary ethics scheduled to be released by Prometheus next year.

Jonathan Kurtz said his father was not afraid of death and spent a "joyful" final day telling jokes and discussing his favorite football team. "His true religion," his son said, "was the NFL and the Buffalo Bills."

He took, not surprisingly, a philosophical approach to death.

"If I went to heaven or hell," he once said, "I'd try to create a revolution. I'd immediately pass out pamphlets, asking God to change the furniture in the universe and reorder it in a more just way.

"This is hypothetical, of course."

"Paul Kurtz, 86, Humanist Publisher, Dies"

by

Bruce Weber

October 23rd, 2012

The New York Times

Paul Kurtz, a philosopher whose advocacy of reason ahead of faith helped define contemporary secular humanism, died on Saturday at his home in Amherst, N.Y. He was 86.

He had been treated for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his son, Jonathan, who is the president of Prometheus Books, the publishing house his father founded in 1969, and who confirmed the death.

Professor Kurtz taught philosophy at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, from 1965 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1991. But his wider influence came as a publisher of books and magazines devoted to fact-based, rather than faith-based, solutions to human problems, and as a writer who, in more than 40 books and hundreds of articles, promoted an ethical system independent of religion.

Professor Kurtz founded the Center for Inquiry, which promotes evidence-based reasoning and opposes organized religion, and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (known as Csicop), which is dedicated to debunking pseudosciences.

In 1973, as editor of the magazine The Humanist, Professor Kurtz drafted what came to be known as Humanist Manifesto II, in which he updated a 1933 document by addressing issues that the earlier document, which was largely a critique of theism, had failed to touch on, among them nuclear arms, population control, racism and sexism.

The document was signed by 120 religious leaders, philosophers, scientists and writers, including the dissident Soviet physicist Andrei D. Sakharov; Dr. Francis Crick, a discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule; and the novelist Isaac Asimov. It argued for a system of world law that would “transcend the limits of national sovereignty.”

“Traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species,” the document said.

In its best-known dictum, it declared, “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.”
In 1980, in response to the conservative religious movement the Moral Majority, Professor Kurtz founded the journal Free Inquiry. In its inaugural issue he drafted another statement, “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” in which he warned that “the reappearance of dogmatic authoritarian religions” had become a threat to intellectual freedom, human rights and scientific progress. The statement, signed by 61 scholars, directed its objections toward “fundamentalist, literalist and doctrinaire Christianity; a rapidly growing and uncompromising Muslim clericalism in the Middle East and Asia; the reassertion of orthodox authority by the Roman Catholic papal hierarchy; nationalist religious Judaism; and the reversion to obscurantist religions in Asia.”

Not surprisingly, Professor Kurtz and the secular humanist movement drew the wrath of the religious.

“Humanism is basically Satan’s philosophy and program,” the evangelist H. Edward Rowe wrote in a 1976 book, “Save America.” “Certain features of it may sound reasonable, but it always leads to tragedy, simply because it ignores the guidance of God.”

Humanists in general and Professor Kurtz in particular have also been criticized by some atheists as not aggressive enough in opposing the credibility of religious myths. But Professor Kurtz wrote that humanists, who “may be agnostics, atheists or skeptics,” believed that their obligation was to go beyond deriding religion. In 2009, he resigned from the board of the Center for Inquiry, in part because he felt it was on too contentious a path.

“If religion is being weakened, what replaces it in secular society?” Professor Kurtz said in an interview with The New York Times in 2010. “Most of my colleagues are concerned with critiquing the concept of God. That is important, but equally important is, where do you turn?”

Paul Winter Kurtz was born in Newark on Dec. 21, 1925. His father was a restaurateur in Irvington, N.J. He attended public schools and enrolled in New York University but soon left to enlist in the Army during World War II. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and entered the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau shortly after their liberation, helping with the care of survivors.

After the war he returned to N.Y.U., where he studied with the philosopher Sidney Hook. He graduated in 1948 and went on to earn an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia.

Before Professor Kurtz landed in Buffalo, he taught at Trinity, Vassar and Union Colleges. In addition to editing The Humanist and Free Inquiry, he was the founding editor of Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine that sought to debunk paranormal phenomena, sightings of Bigfoot and extraterrestrials, communications with the dead, and other pseudoscientific claims.

Among his books on humanism is “Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Secularism” (2008), a prescription for living a happy, productive life free of religious dogma.

Professor Kurtz’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, the former Claudine Vial, whom he married in 1961; a brother, James; a sister, Evelyn Mayer; three daughters, Valerie Fehrenback, Patricia Kurtz and Anne Kurtz; and five grandchildren. After his split with the Center for Inquiry, Professor Kurtz started the Institute for Science and Human Values and the journal The Human Prospect. Prometheus Books, which publishes more than 100 books a year — fiction and nonfiction — has a back list of more than 2,500 titles. In March, it will publish Professor Kurtz’s final book, “The Turbulent Universe,” a treatise on how nations and people can come together as one world.

“He founded Prometheus as a hobby,” Jonathan Kurtz said, “and for the rest of his life he referred to it as the hobby that got out of control.”

"Paul Kurtz, 1925-2012"

Skeptical Inquirer Magazine

Paul Kurtz, founder and longtime chair of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry, has died at the age of 86. He was one of the most influential figures in the humanist and skeptical movements from the late 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Among his best-known creations are the skeptics’ magazine Skeptical Inquirer, the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry, and the independent publisher Prometheus Books.

Early Life. 

Paul Kurtz was born on December 21, 1925, to Martin and Sarah Kurtz of Newark, New Jersey. He enrolled briefly at Washington Square College of New York University before enlisting in the U. S. Army at age 19, at the height of World War II. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and served in a unit that liberated the Dachau concentration camp. He was demobilized eighteen months after the war’s end and resumed his studies at New York University (NYU).

At NYU Kurtz studied philosophy under Sidney Hook, who had himself been a protégé of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The philosophy of Dewey and Hook, arguably the greatest American thinkers in the humanist tradition, would deeply influence Kurtz’s thought and activism. Kurtz graduated from NYU in 1948 and earned his Ph. D. in philosophy at Columbia University in 1952.

Academic Career. 

Kurtz taught philosophy at Trinity College from 1952 to 1959. He joined the faculty at Union College from 1961 to 1965; during this period he was also a visiting lecturer at the New School for Social Research. In 1965 he was recruited by the new State University of New York at Buffalo. The former University of Buffalo had recently been absorbed into the state university system; under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the institution launched an aggressive program to recruit top young academics to its faculty. Kurtz became professor of philosophy at SUNY-Buffalo, a post he held until his retirement from teaching in 1991. At this stage of his career, Kurtz focused principally on methods of objective inquiry and the history of American philosophy. He contributed the significant entry “American Philosophy” to the influential first edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), edited by Paul Edwards. He edited two large anthologies of American philosophy and published his best-known scholarly work, Decision and the Condition of Man (1968).

The Humanist Movement. 

It was in the late 1960s that Kurtz embarked on the pursuit whose prominence would exceed even that of his career as a philosopher, when he began his involvement with the humanist movement. In 1967 he was named editor of The Humanist, published by the American Humanist Association (AHA), then the nation’s only significant humanist organization. He took the magazine in new directions, both by making its content more sharply critical of religion and by using aggressive techniques to expand its circulation. Arguably, The Humanist never enjoyed greater cultural prominence or higher circulation than during Kurtz’s editorship, but his forceful style led to friction with others within AHA, including some members of its board of directors. Kurtz gave up editorship of The Humanist and parted ways with AHA in 1978. Ironically, that was the very year in which, owing to Kurtz’s influence, AHA moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Amherst, New York, the location of SUNY-Buffalo’s suburban campus. (AHA would remain headquartered off Harlem Road in Amherst until it moved to Washington, D. C., in 2000.)

Kurtz was for more than a quarter-century an influential figure in the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), a worldwide network of national humanist organizations founded in Amsterdam in 1952. He joined IHEU’s board of directors in 1969 and served as the organization’s co-chairman from 1986 to 1994. During this period, Kurtz hosted IHEU’s Tenth World Congress, held at SUNY-Buffalo during the summer of 1988.

The Kurtz-founded Organizations. Kurtz would be better known for his work through organizations he founded and shaped from their inception.

In 1969 he founded Prometheus Books, a for-profit publishing company that quickly emerged as the dominant imprint in skepticism, humanism, and atheism. It would become the most prolific publisher of atheist and humanist titles in history. Since its founding it has published more than 2500 titles in what has become a broad range of genres. Significant milestones included the 1998 acquisition of most of the assets of the scholarly publisher Humanities Press International, giving rise to Prometheus’s imprint Humanity Books, and the formation in 2005 of its Pyr division, which has emerged as a prestige imprint for science fiction and fantasy fiction. Now led by Paul Kurtz’s son Jonathan, the most impressive achievement of Prometheus Books may be that it has retained its independence during five decades in which an enormous number of independent publishers closed down or were absorbed. Paul Kurtz was perhaps best known for the three mutually supportive not-for-profit organizations he founded in Buffalo and later Amherst, New York, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry.

Kurtz and others founded the world’s first organization devoted solely to scientific criticism of paranormal claims at an April 1976 conference at SUNY-Buffalo whose participants included author Isaac Asimov, author-mathematician Martin Gardner, and magician James Randi. The organization was originally known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and became widely known by its acronym, CSICOP. Several months after its formation CSICOP launched a journal, The Zetetic, which later achieved great prominence as the Skeptical Inquirer, which continues to be published bimonthly. During its early years CSICOP encouraged the formation of local skeptics groups across the United States, and of independent national skeptics organizations across the world. These groups would form the kernel of today’s international skeptical movement. In 2006, the organization shortened its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, partly to show that its concerns now extended beyond its original focus on paranormal claims to include the public understanding of science and issues in medicine and mental health.

In 1980, two years after his departure from the American Humanist Association, Kurtz launched a new, more explicitly nonreligious humanist organization, the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH). The word “Democratic” was added to demonstrate the group’s opposition to Communist totalitarianism, an important consideration since non-theism was then strongly associated with Communism in the public mind. The new organization’s first act was to release A Secular Humanist Declaration, a position document originally signed by 57 distinguished activists and academics. Its release was covered in a front-page story in the New York Times. The Council simultaneously launched a journal, Free Inquiry, with Kurtz as its publisher and founding editor. Free Inquiry quickly became the best-respected and highest-circulation humanist magazine in the U. S. It continues to be published bimonthly.

In 1996, in response to the collapse of European Communism, the organization shortened its name to the Council for Secular Humanism. It maintains a network of independent local groups, operates North America’s only freethought museum, and engages in a variety of educational and advocacy activities. Since 2007 the Council has been lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenges contracts between the state of Florida and explicitly religious social service providers.

In 1991, Kurtz’s skeptical and secular-humanist organizations relocated from Buffalo to Amherst, New York. In the same year Kurtz founded a third major non-profit organization, the Center for Inquiry. Originally conceived as a platform for consolidating activities that CSICOP and CODESH conducted in parallel, from magazine production to payroll, the Center grew into an advocacy organization in its own right. Its agenda encompassed both CSICOP’s skepticism and CODESH’s secular humanism, placing both in a broader cultural and intellectual context. In addition to the Center for Inquiry headquarters campus in Amherst, which Kurtz expanded to some 35,000 square feet, there at various times more than fifty branch Centers for Inquiry operated in other American cities and across the world, employing a variety of operating models. From its transnational headquarters at Amherst, the Center conducted a wide range of educational programs, including an online master’s degree program in conjunction with the University at Buffalo. Its research libraries hold the world’s largest collections of humanist, skeptical, and related literature.

Awards and Recognitions. 

Paul Kurtz received numerous awards and other encomia. In 1992 he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1996 the main-belt asteroid Kurtz 6629 was named in his honor. In 2000 he received the International Rationalist Award at the Second International Rationalist Conference at Trivandrum, India. In 2001 he received the Charles P. Norton Medal, the highest award bestowed by the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 2009 he received the Eupraxsopher Award, a special lifetime achievement award, from the Center for Inquiry, as well as the Philip J. Klass Award from the National Capital Area Skeptics. In 2010 he received a lifetime achievement award at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Publications. 

Paul Kurtz wrote or edited more than fifty books for scholarly or general audiences. Among the better-known are Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness (1977); Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism (1988); Eupraxophy: Living without Religion (1989); The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal (1991); The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (1992); and What Is Secular Humanism? (2006). His works have been translated into multiple languages. He composed a great number of essays, including editorials that appeared in every issue of Free Inquiry magazine from its founding in 1980 until 2009.

Kurtz was also organized humanism’s most prolific composer of position documents. When the joined the humanist movement, it was still strongly influenced by the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. Drafted and signed by Unitarian ministers (with the conspicuous exception of signer John Dewey), the original Manifesto explicitly envisioned humanism as a new religion. On Kurtz’s view, a more secular formulation was needed. As editor of The Humanist he led a campaign for a new and more relevant Manifesto. Humanist Manifesto II was published in 1973, having been co-drafted by Kurtz and fellow humanist leader Edwin H. Wilson. Where its predecessor was religious, Manifesto II explicitly abjured religiosity. In a passage reflecting Kurtz’s writing style, it declared: “Some humanists believe we should reinterpret traditional religions and reinvest them with meanings appropriate to the current situation. Such redefinitions … perpetuate old dependencies and escapisms; they easily become obscurantist, impeding the free use of the intellect. We need, instead, radically new human purposes and goals.”

Manifesto II was signed by 114 activists and thought leaders at first publication, and would eventually attract 261 distinguished signers. Its release garnered worldwide media attention including a front-page story in The New York Times.

The previously mentioned A Secular Humanist Declaration (1980) was drafted solely by Kurtz. It offered a secular humanist interpretation of many of the ideas developed in Manifesto II, but steeped in the recognition that an unquestionably nonreligious humanist institution needed to be created, close to but slightly outside of a larger humanist movement that included both religious and nonreligious humanists.

In the late 1990s Kurtz began to compose a new successor document. Originally he planned to title it Humanist Manifesto III, asserting the right to do so as the sole living co-author of Manifesto II. After the American Humanist Association asserted ownership of the Manifesto title and threatened legal action, Kurtz retitled his document Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism was issued in 1999 with about 200 signatures. It was book-length, far lengthier than the previous Manifestos, and represented the fullest statement of Kurtz’s vision for humanism as a planetary commitment transcending national and ethnic identities. Besides challenging religion and championing the scientific outlook and freedom of thought, Kurtz called for a popularly elected global parliament, a World Court, a global environmental monitoring institution, and a new international tax to aid the developing world. These internationalist contentions engendered substantial controversy within the humanist movement.

Principal Contentions. 

Kurtz consistently asserted that morality should be rooted in human flourishing and happiness, not on supernatural revelation. He attached high priority to individual liberty in a robustly democratic culture. His ethics were primarily utilitarian, but he tempered his utilitarianism with a strong commitment to basic liberties. As early as 1969 he had written that “there are two basic and minimal principles which especially seem to characterize humanism. First, there is a rejection of any supernatural conception of the universe and a denial that man has any privileged place within nature. Second, there is an affirmation that ethical values are human and have no meaning independent of human experience.” Repeatedly he characterized secular humanism less as a set of moral or philosophical prescriptions than as a process, a template for the conduct of ethical inquiry.

Two further contentions strongly influenced Kurtz’s thought and writing beginning in the mid-1980s. The first was his growing sense of humanism as necessarily planetary. He argued that since the principal problems confronting humankind were global in scope, they required transnational solutions. This view was accompanied by an assertive cosmopolitanism that viewed traditional religious, ethnic, and national identities as archaisms to be jettisoned whenever possible.

In addition, he sought an authoritative answer to the question “If secular humanism is not a religion, what is it?” His solution was to coin a new word, eupraxophy (in later years spelled eupraxsophy). Formed from Greek roots meaning roughly “good wisdom and practice in conduct,” the word was meant to label a novel category of intellectual and moral systems that met some of the social needs served by religions without the supernaturalism or authoritarianism of traditional faiths. Kurtz made his most extended argument for the coinage in his 1989 book Eupraxophy: Living without Religion. A subsequent edition was titled Living without Religion: Eupraxsophy. The neologism’s move from title to subtitle reflected the coinage’s fate. Kurtz’s arguments for eupraxsophy were received respectfully, and some activists eagerly restyled themselves “eupraxsophers.” Ultimately, however, the term failed to maintain traction and it is infrequently used in the movement today.

Later Life. 

While Kurtz’s son Jonathan had succeeded him as president of Prometheus Books, Kurtz continued to exercise day-to-day control of the non-profit organizations he had founded well past his eightieth birthday. After 2005 there was heightened concern on the part of the organizations’ directors to implement a specific succession process. In June 2008, attorney and philosopher Ronald A. Lindsay succeeded Kurtz as president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Lindsay was Kurtz’s personal selection for the position. Kurtz continued to serve as board chair until June 2009, when Buffalo investment advisor Richard Schroeder was elected Chair and Kurtz assumed the new position of Chair Emeritus. Kurtz faced this process with increasing reluctance, and on May 18, 2010, he announced his resignation from all of his remaining positions at the three nonprofit organizations. His office continued to be reserved for his use whenever the Center for Inquiry – Transnational in Amherst was open.

Late in 2010, Kurtz announced the founding of a new organization, the Institute for Science and Human Values. It released a manifesto-style document titled Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values with more than 150 signers and announced a new quarterly journal, The Human Prospect.

Conclusion. 

Ultimately, Paul Kurtz did much to shape the American and world humanist movements during the final third of the twentieth century. He was a prodigious organizer, responsible for much of the social landscape through which nonreligious Americans moved before the emergence of the so-called New Atheist movement in the middle 2000s. At the same time, a vibrant and varied skeptics’ community now served by dozens of local and national organizations might not exist at all – and surely would not have its current form – if not for Kurtz’s founding of the first modern skeptical organization, CSICOP. His most enduring legacy may be the Center for Inquiry, which continues to stand as the larger movement’s largest, most active, and highest-budgeted organization. 

Paul Kurtz [Wikipedia]

Skeptical Inquirer Magazine

Deceased--Marjorie Grene

Marjorie Grene
December 13th, 1910 to March 16th, 2009

Not exactly a household name save among us philosophers. Marjorie Grene at the age of 98 passed away on the 16th. She was associaated with Carnap, Heidegger, Hempel, Jaspers, Lewis, Prall, Whitehead and was Professor Emerita of philosophy at Virginia Tech.

She studied with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, leaving Germany in 1933. She was in Denmark in 1935, and then at the University of Chicago. After losing her position there during World War II, she spent 15 years as a mother and farmer. In 1995 the International Society for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, established a Marjorie Grene prize for work by younger scholars. ISHPSSB noted that her work in the history and philosophy of biology exemplified the strong spirit of interdisciplinary work fundamental to ISHPSSB, that she played a central role in bringing together diverse scholars of biology even before the formation of the Society, and that she had been a valued mentor to many members of the Society and a long-standing inspiration to all.--Wikipedia.

The Believer interview with Benjamin Cohen:

Marjorie Grene

[PROFESSOR EMERITA OF PHILOSOPHY, VIRGINIA TECH]
"PHILOSOPHERS DON’T ALL BELIEVE THAT ETHICS IS JUST BASED ON INTUITION. THAT’S JUST STUPID! IT’S IGNORAMUS!"

Things that make Marjorie Grene cranky:
Wretched self-reflection
Misinterpreting Michael Polanyi’s theories
George W. Bush
Stupid questions about Darwin
Being accused of killing Imre Lakatos

Marjorie Grene, the ninety-four-year-old professor emerita of philosophy at Virginia Tech, is difficult to categorize. She is at once an intellectual giant, the personification of hostile irascibility, and a kind and gentle great-grandmother. She verbally berates cocky students and fellow professors who make slipshod arguments, slamming her fists on the table and yelling "no no no no no" in the seminar room, but then strolls the hall, distributing cookies and candy to all who want them.

Sort of a philosopher's philosopher, her legacy is not widely known outside academic circles. Nonetheless, as the author of about twenty books, a hundred or so articles, and five translations (with one more on the way), and as the recipient of a host of accolades, her influence is unquestionably significant.

Professor Grene studied Plato with Heidegger, Kant and Hegel with Karl Jaspers, and Descartes with a bunch of professors she’d rather not talk about. Between tours of duty with logical positivists, existentialists, and phenomenologists, she took a fifteen-year hiatus from philosophy to farm and raise a family in Ireland and Illinois. Depending on whom you talk to, she may have been involved in the death of a fellow philosopher. Perhaps most prominently, she is considered a founder of the philosophy of biology, though she refrains from taking credit.

After convincing her that the Believer was not religiously affiliated-which required three verbal assurances, two hyperlinks, and finally a hard copy of the Ice Cube issue-we met in her office where our conversation turned on matters historical, personal, and otherwise. In the course of the discussion, it turned out Professor Grene cut through a pretty decent swath of twentieth-century thought.--Benjamin R. Cohen.

I. MARJORIE GRENE IS NOT, NOR DOES SHE WANT TO BE, A HERMIT.

THE BELIEVER: You were recently featured as the subject of the twenty-ninth volume of the Library of Living Philosophers. Previous editions have been devoted to Alfred North Whitehead, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Dewey, and even Albert Einstein. What did you think when they approached you about doing this?

MARJORIE GRENE: I thought they must be looking desperately for a woman.

BLVR: What do you think about people who see you as a role model, as a pioneering professional female philosopher?

MG: I think they're pretty silly. They have no idea how different things used to be.

BLVR: In that LLP volume, you include a brief intellectual bio where you talk about your education. It all sounds very straightforward, as though it all was pursued with ease and confidence. You graduated from Wellesley with a degree in zoology, studied philosophy at Radcliffe, and from there took courses at Harvard. It’s a pretty astonishing record. Did you always have the confidence that you have now?

MG: I don't understand what you mean.

BLVR: Well, for example, you say you studied some at the Harvard program but it wasn't very "rigorous."

MG: When I took my PhD at Radcliffe, yes. Women were not admitted at Harvard then. But no, I don't know what you mean, this "rigorous" question.

BLVR: For me, it's hard to understand how that could be easy, or unrigorous. You make it sound like such smooth sailing. People like Alfred North Whitehead, and-

MG: Oh, Whitehead gave lovely, out-of-this-world lectures. But I was scared to go to his seminar, so I hadn't anything to do with him personally. Wolfson was sort of off on his own somewhere. Ralph Barton Perry wasn’t any use to anybody, and Hocking was a joke.[1] So who was there?

BLVR: You've said your start in philosophy was rocky, with your instructors at Wellesley insisting that you begin with Descartes' cogito. You refused to accept the cogito as a starting point. I'm not sure I know what that means, to reject that as a premise.

MG: Descartes goes through hyperbolical doubt and comes to this moment when he says: I think, and I am every moment I am thinking, because I have this inner awareness of myself. And I always thought there was something fishy about that. I don't think there's any privileged self-knowledge. Most of our attention is to things outside us.

BLVR: What about the value of self-reflection or seeking self-awareness? Like solitary soul-searching, or a hermit, or something?

MG: I don't know. I would never think of it.

BLVR: Because that’s not how people actually live?

MG: I don't know. It wouldn’t occur to me. Why would anyone want to be a hermit? That has nothing to do with the cogito.

BLVR: I was thinking about in terms of self-reflection. And I guess I was right, I don't know what this means.

MG: That's wretched. I don't want to think about who I am!

BLVR: I'm not sure if this follows, but you've also written about existentialism as the contrast of the inauthentic with the authentic. Something about expressions of who we are, or what we are. Can you explain that?

MG: I don't see what's hard to understand about it.

BLVR: Is that contrast the basis of existentialism?

MG: No, no, I hope I didn’t say that. It was one of the concepts that was put forward by the people who said they were existentialists. But it's a concept you can get, for instance, in Jane Austen's Emma. You don't have to be a philosopher to understand it. The existentialists certainly are not necessary for that. The difference between somebody who really acts as a person and a person who is sort of putting on a front and pretending, this is everywhere.

BLVR: In the early 1930s, you studied in Germany with some big names. How was it with Karl Jaspers, the German existentialist?

MG: That was in Heidelberg in 1932, 1933. I heard lectures of his on Kant, which I thought were quite good. We started on the Hegel seminar, I think it was, but then Hitler came to power and everything was a mess and there wasn't anything anymore.

BLVR: This was the year after you studied with Heidegger in Freiburg?

MG: Yes. Heidegger was on leave that year so I went to Heidelberg.

BLVR: Was it easy to get over there to study, funding-wise?

MG: Well, the first year I was a German-American exchange student. I was an only child and so I had support from my family, too. Didn't cost much. I mean, things were so much cheaper over there. When I went to Denmark in 1935, I had a scholarship that was a hundred dollars a month and they wouldn't believe that I had that much money. Nobody could have a whole hundred dollars a month! [Laughs]

BLVR: Was there any connection between your studying with Jaspers and then studying Kierkegaard in Denmark? Was Kierkegaard a popular subject at the time?

MG: Not that I know of. But I had written an awful dissertation on Existenzphilosophie and it seemed reasonable to look at the person who was supposed to have started it all. I knew my dissertation wasn't any good. And I didn't think Kierkegaard any good at the time either.

BLVR: Now, about your work with logical positivism. Back in the United States, you went to the University of Chicago, where you worked with Carnap and Hempel, who themselves had fled Europe. But you didn't take much to the logical positivists.

MG: Well, I got over it.

BLVR: It must've been after that when you encountered Sartre's work. A lot of people credit you with introducing him to the U.S. as a legitimate philosopher, and not just an eccentric playwright. Do you think that's fair?

MG: I don't know. I guess. I think my Sartre book's pretty good. And I think he very brilliantly puts forward an impossible point of view. But it's not something we can actually do, or a way we can actually live.

BLVR: It was another philosophy you could get over quickly?

MG: Oh, I don't think I ever fell for it.


II. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT COMPARING MICHAEL POLANYI TO THE COGITO. SERIOUSLY. DON'T.

BLVR: From what I've read, you started doing serious philosophy of science when helping Michael Polanyi in the 1950s. [He wrote about tacit knowledge in science-the noncodifiable parts, the "you can’t logically teach someone how to ride a bike, you just have to know it" thing.] This must have come after your work on existentialism-after your 1948 book, Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism. So with Polanyi, here was a guy who was an accomplished working scientist, but then shifted and pursued philosophical issues in science. And you, apparently, were his co-author and research assistant. But I don't understand how this happened.

MG: You don't?

BLVR: Did he just decide to switch, to give up lab work and do philosophy of science?

MG: No, it wasn't just like that. He left Germany because of the Nazis and he came to Britain and he got interested in the difference between the two cultures, German and British. He was worried about the way science was organized in Russia, with the state doing it all. There were a lot of people in Britain at the time who thought this should be done-that the state should be responsible for structuring how science gets done. But Polanyi thought you needed a certain kind of spontaneity to have science. So that was where he started, and he wrote a bunch of essays. I think they came out under the title The Logic of Liberty [1951], or something like that. And he was asked to give the Gifford Lectures [in Aberdeen] and that's what developed into Personal Knowledge [1958].

BLVR: Did he seek you out for help? Or was it just happenstance?

MG: While I was living near Chicago he came to lecture there. And I went to hear him and then talked to him, and he asked me if I would help him with his lectures.

BLVR: What was particularly new about what he said?

MG: I don't know if there was anything new. It seems to me I was reading something the other day that said the same thing. Maybe it was in [early American pragmatist philosopher C.S.] Peirce, I don’t know. But, in the first, there was this business about the relation of freedom to science. Then there was the question of the method of science, and I think these probably aren't altogether unrelated. That is, when you have a central organization, you tell people what to do and it's supposed to be all explicit. On the other hand, when people are actually working in a good lab or a theoretical situation, there's a lot that goes on that isn't explicit. When you get into the discipline, you learn to recognize things that you then don't focus on, because they are just, so to speak, part of you. And he was interested in emphasizing what he called… well, he later called it the tacit dimension. But he first said, oh, I don't remember, but it was the things that you don't express and can’t express. He didn't say the inexpressible.

BLVR: At the time, was there any connection between that idea-things that you can't express-and what other people might think of as the cogito?

MG: No!! Absolutely not!! There couldn't be anything more different in the world! The cogito is just you, thinking of yourself, existing now and nothing else! Polanyi's work is a denial of the cogito!! That's probably why I took to it. God, no.

BLVR: OK. I want to back out of this and move on. "All knowledge is orientation." This is your slogan that I've seen written repeatedly. Could you elaborate on that?

MG: Well, that's just what we've been talking about in Polanyi! In recent years, the last twenty-five or so, I've been very influenced by J. J. Gibson's psychology of perception [in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979] and the notion of affordance. That is, we're always trying to locate ourselves in our environment. There's information given us by the environment that we can pick up, so as to perceive what things afford us, what we can do with them. That's not Polanyi, that's Gibson. But I think that's it, the same as "knowledge is orientation" and what Polanyi was after too.

BLVR: You've spoken highly of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, which I'm guessing is important-perception, that is-since it fits with the other biological, maybe holistic views about orienting yourself in the world, and living always in some environment. Maybe holistic isn't the right word.

MG: Oh, but Merleau-Ponty's not phenomenology. Strictly speaking, historically, phenomenology is a school founded by Edmund Husserl, which is very formal and I think very phony. You're supposed to start by bracketing what you're thinking about-that is, suppose it isn't real-and then you try to think of essence and stuff like that. And I think Merleau-Ponty's book is really groundbreaking and important and it's not phenomenology. He was told to call it that, and he had to try to explain what he meant by it and he does it very badly. Because it isn’t phenomenology. It's just a philosophy of perception.

BLVR: These issues seem relevant to a philosophy of biology, about people and animals living in the world. You've talked a lot about how the philosophy of science, as a subject of academic study, would be much different if it were based on biology instead of physics. Can you summarize why that is so? What would be different about how we talk about and understand science?

MG: That's interesting. Somewhere I've got a paper on that which is pretty good. One point is that what you want to study in history and philosophy of biology is the life of science, and not some abstract formula. You want to understand the claims scientists make in the context of their work. And if you’re looking at biota and you're thinking of the environment, you're more likely to do that maybe. The more important point is that the philosophy of science, in its classical form, was based on a rather abstract conception of science. The notion of unified science was always supposed to take it all down to some basic physics. But this view is not tenable.


III. THE ACADÉMIE ON THE HILL

BLVR: Many people consider you the "founding mother" or "founding grandmother" of the philosophy of biology. Your work from the sixties and seventies would certainly lend support to that claim. Did you see yourself as setting out a new field at the time? Was it a conscious effort to develop this new field, to address the shortcomings of a philosophy of science based only on physics?

MG: I have no thoughts on the subject; that's up to others to say. I certainly had no sense of myself as an initiator. Actually, in a sense, one of the earliest things that was called philosophy of biology was J. H. Woodger's text.[2] I think it was kind of hopeless, but he was one of the first to put forward something that was supposed to address philosophical issues of biology.

BLVR: Your 1968 collection of essays, Approaches to a Philosophical Biology, comes to mind. When you started becoming interested in philosophy of biology, what were the issues you were concerned with?

MG: I was publishing on it fairly early, yes. I think 1957. Gosh, though, it was so long ago. I think I first was asking what the basic concepts needed for an adequate theory of evolution are. And, since then, I've also written a lot about taxonomy and the species problem.

BLVR: Was there any relation between your project with Polanyi and the later philosophy-of-biology work?

MG: Not directly. But OK, yes, continually, in the sense that he had asked me to look up heresy in evolutionary theory, because he hadn't a clue about evolutionary theory. He didn't think that neo-Darwinism could be right at all. He was very silly about it, evolutionary theory in general. He said natural selection was like catching two tigers and letting one go! He just had no understanding of evolutionary theory. What he wrote about it was just terrible. He had a friend, a clergyman, who tried to get him to change it. He was just as shocked as I was, this clerical guy. But it was really bad. I think that's when I started looking through the literature, to help him out. Even before that, my work on Aristotle started because I was asked to teach Greek philosophy at Belfast, and I didn't know anything about it so I had to start studying him.

BLVR: You hadn't had any in college, or-?

MG: Well, of course. But not to speak of. I knew much more about Plato than Aristotle.

BLVR: Considering that your A Portrait of Aristotle [1963, 1998] is so widely read and well regarded, I guess that's surprising. But what legacy does Aristotle have for your study of the philosophy of biology?

MG: Well, I think that's how I got into it, through Aristotle.

BLVR: Your work is always embedded in historical context. And your philosophical interests have been based along the lines of the history of philosophy.

MG: That's true. I’ve got one book just out that I translated, a book by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who had a wonderful debate with Georges Cuvier about comparative anatomy in the early 1800s.

BLVR: What interest does that Cuvier-Geoffroy debate hold for you, or for the philosophy of biology? Is the historical importance that it brings out issues later revisited on a more molecular level?

MG: Well, it's interesting in itself. In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, the Musée in Paris was really the center of biological work. Everybody went there, so this is a lively debate to think about and to look at.

BLVR: What were they debating about comparative anatomy?

MG: Cuvier thought we must look very carefully at each kind of organism and understand how it was adapted to its place in nature. And Geoffroy wanted to look for what we would call homologies-he called them analogies-similarities across different species. The one everyone knows about is the limb structure-you know, the horse walks on its middle fingernails, but it has the same structure of a pentadactyl limb that we do or that a bat does, and so on. It gets changed for different purposes, but it has the same fundamental structure. And he was interested in those parallels of structure across different forms. Cuvier was much more interested in how you worked out what something worked for in its own setting.

BLVR: Its purpose.

MG: "Purpose" is maybe not quite right.

BLVR: Did they ever resolve their differences?

MG: No. Cuvier died and Geoffroy went blind. One thing I always liked was that all of the professors at the Académie had houses in the same place, up on the hill all together. Imagine if you had to live with your colleagues! Apart from having a rouse with them intellectually, then you have them as neighbors. [Laughs]


IV. SOME PHILOSOPHERS ARE STUPID, CRUDE, AWFUL, SIMPLE-MINDED AND TOTALLY UNINTERESTING.

BLVR: Since some of the earliest work in the philosophy of biology came in the later 1960s and into the 1970s, I wonder if that was part of a reaction to the growing prominence of molecular biology, and the developments after Watson and Crick in the 1950s.

MG: Not that I know of; I don't think so. I wasn't aware of a relation then.

BLVR: Have you ever studied the philosophical validity of developments coming from the Watson and Crick double-helix stuff? Their arguments for the structure and-

MG: There aren't any arguments against it. I don't know what you're talking about. What's the philosophical problem?

BLVR: What about ideas about replication and transmission? Could they tend towards the reductionism that I've seen you argue against in your work, sort of like Dawkins's selfish gene? That we can explain everything with just a look towards what happens in DNA, without the context in which it happens, or the environment in which it is situated?

MG: That depends on your general attitude. It doesn't depend on the double helix, though. Well, of course, Crick was a very extreme reductionist, yes. He gave a talk in Washington, I don't remember when, and he was nothing but reductionist about genes. It was awful. But you can discover the structure of anything, and it doesn't take it out of its context.

BLVR: It seems to fit with the "knowledge is orientation" slogan in the sense that you are always situating yourself, trying to find your way from some place. Maybe I should ask about those popular ideas, like Richard Dawkins's and The Selfish Gene.

MG: Oh [laughing], that's just a gimmick. I don't take it seriously, though.

BLVR: Seems to be widely known, though. What is the gimmick?

MG: Well, it's not important with anybody who's serious. The gimmick is just that everything is genes, and genes are trying to perpetuate themselves and we're just sort of by-products of that. It's total reductionism, like we've been saying.

BLVR: I should probably ask too about a few other popular figures. Before we started, you said something about Michael Ruse. What's wrong with him?

MG: What's wrong with him? He's totally uninteresting. His earlier book on the Darwinian revolution wasn't too bad. But ever since he declared-I mean, he's a follower of that awful E. O. Wilson-ever since he declared "morality is an illusion foisted upon us by our genes," I haven't taken him seriously.

BLVR: That reminds me, I forgot to ask about Richard Rorty. You're friends with him, though you don't agree with his philosophy?

MG: We are friends, but you can't agree with his philosophy. It doesn’t exist! He's a wit! He should've lived in the eighteenth century. He just makes clever remarks that don't mean anything. The thing about Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is based on a total misinterpretation of Kant. It's totally wrong about Kant, and I'm sort of a Kant person.

BLVR: OK, sorry, I didn't mean to lead us astray. So you're apparently against the later E. O. Wilson-Michael Ruse neo-Darwinism.

MG: That isn't Darwinian. Well, maybe E. O. Wilson thinks he gets it from Darwin. That sociobiology[3] thing is very one-sided and simple-minded, a sort of derivation of everything from I don't know what, the brain or something. But there's none of that in Darwin. I mean, The Descent of Man, maybe you'll find something. And Ruse, he just tries to copy the master [Wilson]. Oh, but Wilson’s terribly crude. He's just the farthest thing from a philosopher. He says, [paraphrasing] "Philosophers believe that ethics is based on intuition, but it isn't, it's based on some part of the brain," I don't know, I've forgotten what exactly. But philosophers don't all believe that ethics is just based on intuition. That's just stupid! It's ignoramus! I mean, he's very good apparently, I guess, at ants as social insects, but he's not very good at anything to do with people.

BLVR: Do you like Darwin?

MG: Like him? What a stupid question. How can anybody say that? How can anybody not like him? What do you mean?

BLVR: Is he interesting to read? Have you read all his work?

MG: Oh, no, certainly not. I haven't read his orchids book. I must get some more of the Darwin-correspondence-project books too. I've only got about the first dozen.

BLVR: How many are there?

MG: Oh, I don't know, but it won't be done in my life.


V. PHILOSOPHY ISN’T FOR ANYTHING!

BLVR: Let's get back to more standard philosophy-of-biology issues, like the so-called modern synthesis-taking evolutionary theory and genetics together. This was proposed earlier in the century. Dobzhanksy is a name that usually gets tied to that.

MG: There were others before him. Oh, in particular I can't recall, but it wouldn’t be any one person first. Well, genetics starts back with Mendel, when you just breed things and see how they come out, but you haven't analyzed DNA and you can't do an analysis at the molecular level of what the hereditary units are or how they are working. And of course there was forty years there, between The Origin of Species and the rediscovery of Mendel.

BLVR: So the thought of using them together was new in the early twentieth century. Was the philosophical validity of the modern synthesis of interest, and maybe not just for you, but as a subject to be studied for the philosophy of biology?

MG: I don't remember specifically addressing it. In the new book that I'm publishing with David Depew, he did the synthesis chapter, and I did other problems in philosophy of biology in the twentieth century. When I started in philosophy of biology, I was worrying about what we call neo-Darwinism and what its limitations are, but I don't remember the synthesis bothering me.

BLVR: What subjects did you cover in this new book?

MG: Well, we had to call it Philosophy of Biology, but its subtitle is An Episodic History. Depew did Aristotle, and then I did Descartes, Harvey, and the beginnings of modern mechanism. And then, let's see, eighteenth and nineteenth century, he did Kant and Darwin, and I did Buffon, the Geoffroy-Cuvier debate, and Darwin and the transition to Mendelism. Then I did questions in philosophy of biology and the relation of philosophy of science to philosophy of biology.

BLVR: On the transition between Darwin and Mendelism-

MG: Well, there were those forty years between them. There was [Dutch botanist] Hugo de Vries in between, and a few others. But nobody knew what to do about heredity. It was a mess.

BLVR: One big thing today is developmental systems theory in biology, which seems to be trying to follow up with these questions.

MG: Oh, I don't know how much it amounts to.

BLVR: Can you, can anyone, even offer a definition of it?

MG: No, I don't think so. I think when they call it a theory, they're exaggerating it. Evo-devo, that’s what they call it. It's the attempt to put evolution and development together. The point is that classical modern evolutionary theory was inclined to emphasize just differential gene frequencies and not consider development. A person named Scott Gilbert was the guy. But I think when they call it development systems theory, it's supposed to make it more important.

BLVR: What is the thing supposed to be?

MG: Supposed to be a theory about how systems develop. [Laughs] It's pretty complicated, and not very advanced yet. I don't know if it'll go, but I can’t say much more about it here.

BLVR: I wanted to ask you about philosophy and politics, especially as it concerns modern genetics and biotechnology. This isn't totally unrelated to your comments on Polanyi's concern with the politics of science-except that was about the governance of scientists as they work, and not the governance of the society within which they work. For example, Bertrand Russell was known for being a very politically engaged philosopher. He wanted to contribute to political life. Do you think there's a role for philosophy in politics? Should it be used for political ends?

MG: No. And no.

BLVR: What is philosophy for?

MG: It isn't for anything! What is knowledge for? It's no use trying to talk philosophy to our politicians. And I'm not a moral or political philosopher. I'm not interested in that.

BLVR: I was thinking more micropolitically, not only with actual politicians. But, anyway, how about that Bush Doctrine? It's a strange bird.

MG: There can't be any such thing! The man hasn't got a mind. So how can there be a doctrine? This would be an embarrassment if it weren't so scary. But this isn't a philosophical problem.

BLVR: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos-

MG: I didn't kill him!!

BLVR: Why does everyone say you had a part in it?

MG: Because once he helped me out of a taxi in London and he hit his head on the door. And I didn't kill him! He died soon, and I don't know if it was the head bump. But it wasn't because of me! [Laughing heartily]

BLVR: OK, we won't get into that. By way of the twentieth century in review, then, let me see if I have this right: you studied with Heidegger, but then rejected his philosophy; studied and worked with existentialists, like Jaspers, but then rejected their work; same for logical positivists, with Carnap and Hempel; Sartre is a brilliant writer but untenable in reality; the critical theorists, Frankfurt Marxists-we didn't get to them actually, but you've said they were unintelligible; I forgot to ask about pragmatism, but from the LLP bio you don’t sound too keen on pragmatism, William James and John Dewey.

MG: That just never interested me.

BLVR: So there's Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, and J. J. Gibson. Those are the few positives.

MG: I think that's right. Most of it is just unintelligible.

__________

1. Harry Wolfson was a renowned philosopher of religion-Jewish tradition and medieval philosophy in particular-and a Hebrew scholar. Ralph Barton Perry was a Pulitzer Prize-winning realist philosopher who wrote about William James and Immanuel Kant. William Ernest Hocking was a well-known idealist philosopher who emphasized religious aspects of philosophy.

2. This is J. H. Woodger, The Axiomatic Method in Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1937).

3. The theory that human nature is totally controlled by our biology.

[Benjamin Cohen lives and works in Blacksburg, VA. He is a former film critic for the Granville Sentinel, a current visiting assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech, and a future editor of something, maybe.]

And from the L. A. Times...

"Marjorie Grene dies at 98; historian of philosophy known as independent thinker"

by

Elaine Woo

March 22nd, 2009

Los Angeles Times

When the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers chose Marjorie Grene as the subject of the 29th volume in its series, the feisty 90-something thinker and writer downplayed her selection with characteristic self-deprecation. "I think," she told a reporter in 2003, "they just desperately wanted a woman."

Grene, who was 98 when she died Monday in Blacksburg, Va., after a short illness, was the first woman chosen for the series, which previously featured such intellectual heavyweights as John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre.

A historian of philosophy, Grene knew Russell and studied with Whitehead as well as with existential theorists Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in a career that cut across seven decades. She left her mark as a formidable and independent thinker with a famously cantankerous style, who could "disarm or slay an opponent with a single phrase or question," Randall E. Auxier, editor of the Library of Living Philosophers, wrote in a preface to "The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene," published in 2002.

Her chief contribution was the leading role she played in founding the field of philosophy of biology, which focuses on topics such as evolutionary theory and genetics.

She also wrote influential texts on existentialism that were "pivotal in bringing existentialism to the attention of the English-speaking world," said Michael Wedin, a philosophy professor at UC Davis, where Grene taught for 13 years starting in 1965.

She was the author of widely admired books on Aristotle, whom she lionized, and Descartes, whom she loathed. Her well-known critiques of Descartes, whose ideas form the foundation of Western philosophy, placed her outside the mainstream of her profession, but she was accustomed to operating on its margins.

Born Marjorie Glicksman in Milwaukee on Dec. 13, 1910, she studied zoology at Wellesley College, earning a bachelor's degree in 1931. She then went to Germany as a graduate student, taking seminars with Heidegger and Jaspers before returning to the United States in 1933. She met Whitehead when she pursued a doctorate at Radcliffe College, "the nearest a woman could get to Harvard in those days," when Harvard would not grant degrees to women, she noted in an autobiographical essay several years ago.

Because of the Depression and the prevailing view in her field that "women were not considered suitable candidates for positions in philosophy," she drifted for a few years, studying Kierkegaard in Denmark and directing a women's residence at a junior college in southern Illinois. In 1937 she found a job as a teaching assistant and later as an instructor at the University of Chicago, where she met her husband, David Grene, who taught classics and became eminent in the field. They were married in 1938.

She remained at the university until 1944 -- "still wartime, with few jobs and few students," she later wrote -- when she was fired.

She spent the next 15 years in academic exile, "something of a scandal in philosophical circles," Wedin said. She worked on her husband's farms in Illinois until 1952 and after that in his native Ireland, where they raised their two children, Ruth and Nicholas, who survive her along with six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

David Grene, whom she divorced in 1961, died in 2002. She never remarried.

She was not entirely grumpy about being a farmer's wife. "My mother always said that she enjoyed being 'Mrs. Grene of Clash,' " Clash being the tiny village 40 miles south of Dublin where she lived full time for 12 years, said Ruth Grene, a professor of plant physiology at Virginia Tech, where her mother was honorary distinguished professor of philosophy from 1988 until her death. But in between slaughtering chickens and feeding pigs, the philosopher-mother-farm wife produced two books, "Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism" (1948) and "Heidegger" (1957). She recalled that every time she wrote about existentialists, "I said, 'Ugh, never again,' " but she accepted the assignments to keep up some semblance of a career. Her work became one of the major conduits through which Sartre's ideas became known in the United States.

During this period, Grene also met Hungarian British scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, providing crucial research for his book, "Personal Knowledge." Her work with Polanyi led her to consider metaphysical and ethical issues in science, particularly biology, tackling questions as fundamental as what constitutes a person. She later was a founding member of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology, the largest such organization of scientists, historians and philosophers.

"The crossing of those boundaries is something she accomplished wonderfully well," said Richard Burian, a philosopher of science at Virginia Tech. "She insisted that philosophy is a dialogue with its own history and every other discipline there is."

At Virginia Tech, Grene was known to stroll the corridors of the philosophy department handing out cookies and candy. The treats perhaps took a little of the edge off her notoriously sharp tongue, which she let loose on everything from bread pudding to mistranslations of Kant.

She saved her most sustained hostility for "the Cogito," as philosophers call Descartes' celebrated declaration, usually translated in English as "I think, therefore I am." Her refusal to accept what she acknowledged as "the unique starting point of philosophy" was vintage Grene.

She was, as family and friends attest, no one's disciple. She wrote limericks about philosophy that poked fun at its personages, such as in this verse about a spat between philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper and his insufficiently reverent student, W.W. Bartley III:

W.W. Bartley the Third

For heretical views was given the bird.

A disciple of Popper, the famous Sir Karl,

He found that the chief had got into a snarl.

For if inductivism's original sin,

Then where does discovery's logic come in!

And how do we tell except by our noses,

Real science from pseudo, and knowledge from poses?