UC San Diego Philosophy Department Institutional Memory

Pat Churchland interviewed by Charlie Rose

2011-12-08T18:30:00.001-08:00

Emerita Professor Pat Churchland was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose - The Charlie Rose Brain Series 2: Consciousness

The Charlie Rose Brain Series 2: Consciousness with Eric Kandel of Columbia University, Patricia Churchland of University of California, San Diego, Stanislas Dehaene of College De France, Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

Marcuse in Verso's Radical Thinkers series

2011-11-17T23:14:00.001-08:00

A Study on Authority

by Herbert Marcuse

Translated by Joris De Bres

The great theorist of radical liberation analyzes the relationship between authority and freedom.

This is the first paperback edition of what is now recognized as Marcuse’s most important collection of writings on philosophy. He analyzes and attacks some of the main intellectual currents of European thoughts from the Reformation to the Cold War. In a survey that includes Luther, Calvin, Kant, Burke, Hegel and Bergson, he shows how certain concepts of authority and liberty are constant elements in their very different systems. The book also contains Marcuse’s famous response to Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, and his critique of Sartre.

Paperback, 111 pages

ISBN: 9781844672097

January 2008

$12.95 / £6.99

Part of the Radical Thinkers series

Reviews

“Marcuse brought a forceful clarity to the leftist table; a classical Marxism willing to confront new realities.”
– The Nation
“Lucid and powerful.”
– New Society
“It is a worldly philosopher's dream: his long neglected works catch fire, illuminate his times and emblazon his name for posterity. It does not often come true, but it did for Herbert Marcuse.”
– Time Magazine
“Well worth reading.”
– Radical Philosophy

San Diego Free Press feature on Angela Davis

2011-08-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

An article on Angela Davis from from volume 1 of the San Diego Free Press (contained in the Radical Press collection at UCSD's Geisel Library). I gather this is from 1969, given that this number is stamped Oct. and (according to Wikipedia) the San Diego Free Press was started by UCSD Philosophy graduate students in November 1968. Davis had finished an M.A. in the Philosophy Department at UCSD, and was working with Herbert Marcuse on a Ph. D.
San Diego Free Press

Getting a Job in Philosophy (advice by UCSD Ph. D. Brian L. Keeley)

2011-06-20T15:08:00.000-07:00

Over at Inside Higher Eduction, Brian L. Keeley (UCSD Philosophy Ph. D., 1997; presently Professor of Philosophy, Pitzer College) has written an extremely useful article for graduate students entitled: Getting a Job in Philosophy. Year-by-year advice is given: this is extremely useful, and I wish I had had it. More about Brian (from his c.v. at his website):

Ph.D., Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego;
Thesis: “Cognitive science as the computational neuroethology of intelligent behavior: Why biological facts are important for explaining cognition.”
Chairs: Patricia Smith Churchland, Sandra D. Mitchell.

"Scientist's Nightstand" interview with Patricia Churchland

2011-06-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

A recent interview of Patricia Churchland about what she likes to read is available online here in American Scientist.

2011 Commemorative Newletter

2011-06-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

The commemorative Philosophy Department newsletter in celebration of the 50th anniversary of UCSD is available here. On pages 5-10 is printed the latest version of my essay "From Historical to Eliminative Mateialism (via German Idealism)", in which I attempt to summarize what I have learned about 47 years of history of the department in 5 pages. Allow me to point out a couple of things about that essay:

(1) All dates are based upon dates found in the UCSD General catalogue. Thus, for example, some people may have been hired a whole year before the date noted in the essay, if their name did not make it onto the department roster until the next year's printing of the roster. Since the department does not retain personnel files on those who are no longer on its faculty, the General Catalogue was only the only consistent source of information to which I had access. This also goes for all the information in the chronology section of this blog.

(2) Much has been left out, and some important people neglected. This is mostly due to my own ignorance. One reason I embarked on this project is because I did not feel that I had a sufficient grasp of the history of the department and its past achievements. I still feel this way. Although I have discovered (for myself at least) many interesting things about the department, and learned about the fascinating people who have been associated with it, I still have a lot to learn. It has already been brought to my attention that I should have said more about Clark Glymour (Professor 1995-?) and Sandra Mitchell (Assistant Professor 1989-1994; Associate Professor 1994-1999). I would also add Helen Longino (Assistant Professor 1971-?) and Elisabeth Lloyd (Assistant Professor 1985-1988) to the list of people about whom I am looking to find out more. Of course there are many others as well. Hopefully I can feature some of the work they produced while at UCSD both on the blog and in later versions of the essay.

(3) I still need help filling out details, and even many larger things. On each segment of the essay I posted on this blog, I begged readers for input, additions, and corrections. And many people have provided me with these and continue to help. Thanks to them, and to the rest of you, I still need help. Please let me know if you notice anything or anyone left out. I hope to have a more complete and final version of the essay done for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Philosophy Department in 2013.

Herbert Marcuse on the Frankfurt School (Video interview by Brian Magee)

2011-06-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

An insightful interview of Herbert Marcuse in 1977 (while he was Honorar Professor of Philosophy at UCSD) by Brian Magee for the television series "Modern Philosophy" is now available on Youtube. (In 5 sections; section 1 below:)

New reviews of Pat Churchland's BRAINTRUST

2011-05-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

Update: Pat was interviewed on KPBS this morning: you can listen the interview or read a transcript here.

Following up the earlier post on Patricia S. Churchland's new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton 2011), here are some recent reviews available electronically:

Margaret Boden. If it feels good, perhaps it is. (Review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality) Times Higher Education Supplement 5 May 2011.

Steven Poole's Nonfiction Choice- Reviews. The Guardian 7 May 2011.

Richard S. Mathis. Our Caring Neurons. (Review of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality). Science 13 May 2011: Vol. 332 no. 6031 p. 793. (Note: requires institutional access.) DOI: 10.1126/science.1205721

Congratulations to Pat on these very engaging and laudatory reviews.

Martini or Chardonnay?

2011-04-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite moments at yesterday's Symposium to Celebrate UCSD's 50th Anniversary was when Henry Allison hypothesized that his philosophical differences from Paul Churchland might stem from Henri's preference for Martinis over Chardonnay (the drink Paul and Pat use to restore their glucocorticoid and dopamine levels). What interesting arguments the great German Idealist and the great Eliminative Materialist must have had while playing golf! I should've asked who won-- the golf game, I mean.

From Historical to Eliminative Materialism (via German Idealism), part 4: the 1990s

2011-03-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Please help me improve this essay by offering corrections, additions, suggestions, or comments.

The 1990s

One can gauge the reputation of the Department during the 1990s by considering that UCSD Philosophy Professors thrice gave Presidential Addresses to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association during the 1990s: Pat Churchland, 'Can neurobiology teach us anything about consciousness?' (1993); Henry Allison, 'We Can Act Only under the Idea of Freedom’ (1997); and Philip Kitcher, 'Truth or Consequences?' (1998).

On top of these honors, Patricia Smith Churchland won a McArthur Fellowship in 1991. Later, in 1997, the department hired a 1994 McArthur Fellow, Professor Nancy D. Cartwright. As far as I can tell, UCSD is the only Philosophy Department in which there were, until the Churchlands’ retirement in 2010, simultaneously active in the same philosophy department two former McArthur Fellows.

By the end of the decade Nancy Cartwright had published The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge 1999). She added considerable strength to a Department whose profile in the philosophy of science was raised by Philip Kitcher who published two important books in the 1990s, The Advancement of Science (Oxford, 1993), and The Lives to Come: the genetic revolution and human possibilities (New York and London).

Robert Pippin chaired the Department for the first half of the decade (1990-1995), a period in which the history faculty continued an impressive streak of publications in history of philosophy: Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, 1990); Nicholas Jolley, The light of the soul: theories of ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford, 1990); Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford, 1992); Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford, 1993),; and Georgios Anagnostopoulos, Aristotle on the Goals and Exactness of Ethics (California, 1994). The department also added two more faculty members in the area of German idealism. The first was Assistant Professor Wayne M. Martin in 1994, who published Idealism and objectivity: understanding Fichte's Jena project (Stanford, 1997). The department also added Associate Professor Michael Hardmon in 1995. Michael had recently published Hegel and Social Philosophy (Cambridge, 1994).

During this period the logician and epistemologist Gila Sher, who had been hired as an Assistant Professor in 1989, published The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized Viewpoint (Cambridge, MA, 1992). She won tenure in 1994 and remains Professor (as of 2001).

Patricia W. Kitcher was Chair for the second half of the decade (1995 -1999). In addition to her book on Kant published in 1994 mentioned above, and an impressively diverse and interesting set of articles, she published in 1996 Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind (Cambridge MA).

In 1995 the department hired, in addition to Michael Hardimon, Associate Professors David O. Brink and Frederick W. Neuhouser in the field of social and political philosophy. Gerald Doppelt, who had developed several innovative undergraduate courses in the area, was honored for this by his colleagues with an Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997.

Major Publications by UCSD Philosophers 1990-1999

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KEY PUBLICATIONS 1990-1999

1990: Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge). Richard Arneson, 'Liberalism, distributive subjectivism, and equal opportunity for welfare', Philosophy and Public Affairs. Gerald Doppelt, 'The Naturalist Conception of Methodological Standards in Science: A Critique', Philosophy of Science. Nicholas Jolley, The light of the soul: theories of ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford).

1991: Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford). Gila Sher, The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized Viewpoint (Cambridge, MA).

1993: Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford, 1993). Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (Oxford). Stanley Moore, Marx versus Markets (University Park).

1994: Georgios Anagnostopoulos, Aristotle on the Goals and Exactness of Ethics (California). Pat Churchland, 'Can neurobiology teach us anything about consciousness?' (Presidential address delivered before the sixty-seventh annual Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco, March 26, 1993), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67. Michael O. Hardimon, Hegel's Social Philosophy (Cambridge); 'Role Obligations', Journal of Philosophy 91. Avrum Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (Oxford).

1995: Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: a Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, MA); Nicholas Jolley, (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz (Cambridge). Patricia Kitcher, Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind (Cambridge MA). Frederick A. Olafson, What is a Human Being? A Heideggerian view (Cambridge).

1996: Henry Allison, Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge). Philip Kitcher, The Lives to Come: the genetic revolution and human possibilities (New York and London).

1997: Henry Allison, 'We Can Act Only under the Idea of Freedom: Presidential address delivered before the seventy-first annual Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, California, March 28, 1997', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71. Wayne Martin, Idealism and objectivity: understanding Fichte's Jena project (Stanford).

1998: Philip Kitcher, 'Truth or Consequences?' (Presidential address delivered before the seventy-second annual Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Los Angeles, California, March 28, 1998), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 72. Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics (Cambridge). Avrum Stroll, Surfaces (Minneapolis); Sketches of Landscapes: philosophy by example (Cambridge, MA); 'Proper names, names, and fictive objects', The Journal of Philosophy.

1999: Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge 1999). Gila Sher, 'Is There a Place for Philosophy in Quine's Theory?' The Journal of Philosophy 96.

From Historical to Eliminative Materialism (via German Idealism), part 3: the 1980s

2011-03-15T13:21:00.001-07:00

Please help me improve this essay with corrections, comments, and suggestions.

The 1980s

During the 1980s, Professors in the UCSD Philosophy Department made seminal contributions to the history of philosophy, in particular to the study of German idealism. In 1982 Bob Pippin published an important study on Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason (New Haven). In the following year Henry Allison published a modern masterpiece of Kantian scholarship, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, 1983). This work has instigated a major revival in the study of Kant in Anglo-American philosophy and is a widely considered a classic interpretation; it has later been revised and expanded in a second edition. For the advanced student of the history of philosophy, it offers the most sensible and accessible inroads to Kant’s critical philosophy. Also, in 1984, Nicholas Jolley published Leibniz and Locke: a study of the New Essays on Human Understanding (Oxford). In 1989 Bob Pippin rounded off an extraordinarily productive decade of publication in the area of German idealism with his Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge).

In the area of social and political philosophy, Bob Pippin also edited, in collaboration with UCSD Philosophy Doctor Andrew Feenberg, a collection of critical essays on the by then deceased but still widely influential Marcuse: Critical Theory and The Promise of Utopia (1988). Richard Arneson and Jerry Doppelt also wrote numerous important articles on topics and figures including but also beyond the New Left and Marxism, in areas more of the mainstream of contemporary ethics, including essays on equality and welfare.

In the area of contemporary philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology, the department enjoyed the affiliation of the influential Professor of Linguistics Sige-Yuki Kuroda as an active Adjunct Professor in the Philosophy Department at UCSD throughout the decade and until 1994. In this area Zeno Vendler also published in 1984 his The Matter of Minds (Oxford).

The biggest development in the UCSD Philosophy department, arguably since the founding, was the ambitious effort in the 1980s to develop core strength in the philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. To this end, the Department hired the dynamic duo Professors Patricia Smith Churchland and Paul M. Churchland in the middle of the decade. Pat was later appointed Presidential Professor of Philosophy in 2000; Paul was appointed to the Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy 2005. Both took their turn as Chairs of the department, Paul from 1987-1990, and Pat from 2000-2007. As stated in their recent profile in the New Yorker and in their message in the departmental newsletter upon being appointed Professors Emeriti (in 2010), the work of Pat and Paul has been a largely collaborative effort. Their contributions to the philosophy of cognitive neuroscience have spearheaded the advancement of the new field of “neurophilosophy” (including “neuroethics”). Their robust defense of the thesis of eliminative materialism (which ironically came around the same time the department was winning renown for new researches into German idealism) has kept the department famous for hard-core materialism, which seamlessly replaced the department’s earlier fame for the advocacy of historical materialism, which had been taught, researched, and defended at UCSD by Marcuse, Moore, and others. Although there is no direct philosophical connection between historical and eliminative materialism, from the longer-range historical perspective it seems to be no accident that the proponents of such a radical materialist theses found their intellectual home in the same UCSD Philosophy department.

The second major development in the department’s effort to develop strength in philosophy of science came in 1986, when the Department of Philosophy, along with History and Sociology, established the Science Studies Program, an interdisciplinary program. The same year the Department of Philosophy also hired Professors Philip S. Kitcher (later appointed Presidential Professor of Philosophy, 1997), Stephen P. Stich, and Associate Professor Patricia W. Kitcher. These developments did in fact establish UCSD as a major center for research and teaching in the History and Philosophy of Science, despite the departure of Stitch and the Kitchers in the early to mid 1990s.

From Historical to Eliminative Materialism (via German Idealism), part 2: the 1970s

2011-03-14T15:40:00.001-07:00

Please help me improve this essay with corrections, comments, or suggestions.

The 1970s

Although Paul Henry and Richard Popkin had left the Department by 1973, UCSD Philosophy continued to build on its strengths throughout the decade of the 1970s, adding several faculty members who remain among its most active and important.

In the history of philosophy, Georgios H. Anagnostopoulos had been hired as an Assistant Professor in 1969. His research focuses on Aristotle. Georgios chaired the department from 1983-1987 (and again from 1999-2001 before becoming Acting dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities in 2001-2002). In 1974 Professor Henry E. Allison, a major scholar of modern philosophy and extremely able replacement for Richard Popkin, was hired. Henry was later named Research Professor 1995 and is currently Emeritus (as of 1997). Henry chaired the department immediately before Georgios from 1979-1983. Rapidly adding to its strength in German idealism, the department hired as Assistant Professors Robert B. Pippin in 1975, and S. Nicholas Jolley in 1978. In 1976 UCSD added Professor Edward N. Lee to its roster of Greek philosophers, and he remains Emeritus Professor (as of 1995).

These five recruitments in the history of philosophy continued the strong tradition in history of philosophy that Popkin had established, and three other hires during the decade also strengthened its position in social and political philosophy, adding to the already formidable presence in the department of Herbert Marcuse and Stanley Moore.

In 1971, UCSD recruited away from Harvard’s School of Education Professor Frederick A. Olafson in 1971. Olafson soon became Chair of the Department from 1973-1977; he remains Emeritus Professor (as of 1992). The department made two further hires of Assistant Professors who remain active on the faculty today as full Professors: Richard J. Arneson joined the faculty in 1973, and Gerald. D. Doppelt in 1975.

In the area of philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, and epistemology, an area in which Avrum Stroll had established a name for UCSD, the department hired Professor Zeno Vendler in 1975 (Emeritus, 1988). Vendler had been a founder of the Philosophy Department at the University of Calgary. Avrum Stroll and Fred Olafson wrote an interesting remembrance of him that was published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.

Avrum Stroll and Richard Popkin, having already written together two best-selling introductory philosophy textbooks (Philosophy Made Simple, New York, 1954; Introduction to Philosophy, New York, 1961), revised the Introduction to Philosophy into a second edition (New York, 1972), and also produced a companion volume, Introductory Readings in Philosophy (New York, 1972). Although Stroll and Popkin went on to produce two other introductory philosophy textbooks (!), the two published in 1972 are of particular interest because of what they show about the UCSD undergraduate philosophy curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s. The curriculum is grounded in the reading of extended passages from primary sources from the history of philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Spinoza, and Hume). This tradition of introducing students to philosophy through the reading of primary sources in the history of philosophy continues in the department to this day. For contemporary philosophy, the introductory students in the 1970s read J. L. Austin. In political philosophy, they were made to read Herbert Marcuse’s most influential piece of writing, the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, reprinted in Introductory Readings in Philosophy in its entirety. In the Introduction to Philosophy, Stroll and Popkin both explain and criticize Marcuse’s political philosophy. This shows an extraordinarily high level of collegiality, collaboration, and mutual criticism in the department. One can only hope that the UCSD Philosophy department remains as vibrant today.

Popkin papers at Clark Memorial Library (UCLA)

2011-03-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Professor Jeremy Popkin, the son of UCSD Philosophy Professor (and Department Founder; 1963-1973) Richard Popkin, has informed me that his father's papers are now available at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA.

Jeremy Popkin, as I pointed out before, has authored a biographical essay about his father entitled "In his own words: Richard Popkin's career in philosophy", pp. 259-293 of The Legacies of Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 2008). This is volume 198 of the International Archive of the History of Ideas, a book series established by Richard Popkin and Paul Dibon (visiting UCSD Professor 1964-1966). Jeremy Popkin tells me that he is now editing an interview of his father about his relationship to Herbert Marcuse. Should be very interesting-- I'll try to keep you posted.

From Historical to Eliminative Materialism (via German Idealism), part 1: the 1960s

2011-03-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

Below is a draft of the first section of the brief overview of the history of the UCSD Philosophy Department that I have been assigned to write. Please help me to improve it by offering corrections, comments, or suggestions.

The 1960s

As Nancy Scott Anderson has documented in her An Improbable Venture: a history of the University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, 1993) UCSD was planned from the beginning and top-down to be an instantly excellent University, and it is widely recognized that it has in fact become the best university established in the country since the end of World War II; among the best public universities in the country, if not the best; and one of the greatest scientific research institutions in the world. The origin and subsequent evolution of the Department of Philosophy has to be understood, of course, against this institutional backdrop.

The Philosophy Department at UCSD was founded on July 1, 1963. The first graduate and undergraduate courses were offered in Academic year 1963-1964, making Philosophy the first functioning non-science graduate program at UCSD. The first Ph.D. degree was awarded in 1965 to David Fate Norton. David was also the first Assistant Professor hired by the department, and the first Professor to earn tenure in the department (1970). In 1972, David went on to a Professorship at McGill University and has contributed greatly to the study of David Hume.

Richard Popkin was recruited as the first Chair in 1963. He had already published in 1960 his major work History of Skepticism, which he continued to revise and expand throughout his career at UCSD. It remains an authoritative work on the influence of ancient skepticism on the subsequent history of western philosophy. Simultaneously with the founding of the department in 1963, he established the Journal of the History of Philosophy (recently ranked as the best general journal in the history of philosophy by readers of Brian Leiter’s blog). Popkin also founded the book series International Archives of the History of Ideas, which has now published over 200 monographs.

The other founding Professors, recruited by Popkin in 1963, were Jason L. Saunders, a specialist in ancient philosophy, and Avrum Stroll, a contemporary metaphysician, epistemologist, and philosopher of language, who remains Research Professor Emeritus at UCSD. Avrum gave the first non-science faculty lecture at UCSD in 1964, and he organized what turned out to be a momentous seminar on contemporary Marxism for the scientists in 1964, with Stanley Moore and Herbert Marcuse invited as speakers. As a result of the success of this conference, UCSD hired both Moore and Marcuse the next year.

Stanley Moore, in a low point for academic freedom in the USA, had been fired from Reed College in 1954 after refusing to answer questions about his membership in the Communist Party before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. He was recruited as a senior lecturer at UCSD in 1965 and made a full Professor of Philosophy in 1967. During his time at UCSD, he produced several important books and dozens of articles on Marxism and social-political philosophy. He was affiliated with the department until he died in 1997, and a thoughtful and interesting remembrance of him has been written by Avrum Stroll, Fred Olafson, Dick Arneson and Georgios Anagnostopoulos.

Marcuse was a philosopher and political activist associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, celebrated for his activities while he was a philosophy Professor at UCSD (1964-1979) as “the father of the New Left”. Interest in and research into Marcuse’s philosophy is flourishing: Routledge has recently published 5 volumes of translations of previously unpublished material. Like Moore two decades earlier at Reed, Marcuse became the subject of enormous controversy while he was a Philosophy Professor at UCSD. A death threat was sent to Marcuse at the Department in 1967, but he courageously vowed to continue living and teaching in La Jolla, bolstered by official letters of support published by both the Philosophy Department and the Academic Senate. In 1968 Marcuse participated in and spoke at the Paris demonstrations in the Summer before returning to teach at UCSD in the Fall. His radical activities were heavily criticized by the local media (especially the Union-Tribune) and other local right wing groups such as the John Birch Society and the American Legion. The American Legion started a campaign pressuring the UCSD administration to eliminate Marcuse’s contract. In a very low point in its brief history, William J. McGill (UCSD Chancellor 1968-1970) took the extraordinary cowardly measure of issuing an ad hoc arbitrary mandatory retirement policy in order to force Marcuse to retire (the policy was subsequently dropped and ignored). The Philosophy Department for its part stood by Marcuse and continued to provide him an office, assign him to teach classes and advise students, and to print his name on the official roster of the Department of philosophy in the UCSD General Catalog as Honorar Professor from 1971 until his death in 1979.

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who came to UCSD to work with Marcuse, including Angela Davis, Lowell Bergman, and Andrew Feenberg were political activists and journalists. Some of them produced and contributed to a radical philosophy journal named Alternatives. Edited by Andrew Feenberg, Alternatives contained articles not only by Marcuse, but also by such left-wing luminaries as Linus Pauling, Günther Anders, Hans Meyerhoff, and Barry Commoner. Marcuse’s students also contributed to the vibrant underground newspaper scene, including San Diego Free Press and Street Journal. In their various conflicts with the local media and police, the graduate students and department in general had a strong friend in Roger Ruffin (Judge, Superior Court of California) who served as a Lecturer in the UCSD Philosophy Department from 1967 until 1973.

In the same year that the department hired Moore and Marcuse, they also recruited Professor Paul Henry, a major scholar of late ancient and medieval philosophy. He is best known as the co-editor of the critical edition of Plotinus for Oxford Classical Texts. While at UCSD he authored the entry on “medieval philosophy” for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and also published a monograph on the logic of Peter Abelard.

By 1968, Richard Popkin could write of the new Philosophy Department that, in his opinion, “it has developed so rapidly and so well that it is now generally considered one of the leading departments in the country”. In 1969, amidst all the controversy, Herbert Marcuse was elected President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and addressed its annual meeting in Portland, the first of six UCSD Professors to do so.

Pacific Division APA Presidential Addresses by UCSD Professors (corrected)

2011-03-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

The American Philosophical Division will hold its eighty-fifth (2011) Pacific Division meeting in San Diego on April 20-23. In celebration I here feature the six past Presidential Addresses by UCSD Philosophy Professors. (Requires JSTOR access.)

The first is Herbert Marcuse's 1969 Presidential address, available here.

Herbert Marcuse, 'THE RELEVANCE OF REALITY' (Slightly expanded version of presidential address delivered before the Forty-third annual meeting of the Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Portland, Oregon, March 28, 1969.) Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 42 (1968-1969), 39-50.

The second is Patricia Smith Churchland's 1993 Presidential address, available here.

Patricia Smith Churchland, 'CAN NEUROBIOLOGY TEACH US ANYTHING ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?' (Presidential address delivered before the sixty-seventh annual Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association inSan Francisco, March 26, 1993), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (1994), 23-40.

The third is Henry Allison's 1997 Presidential address, available here.

Henry Allison, 'WE CAN ONLY ACT UNDER FREEDOM' (Presidential address delivered before the seventy-first annual Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, California, March 28, 1997), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71 (1997), 39-50.

The fourth is Philip Kitcher's 1998 Presidential address, available here.

Philip Kitcher, 'TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES?' (Presidential address delivered before the seventy-second annual Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Los Angeles, California, March 27, 1998), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71 (1998), 49-63.

The fifth is Paul M. Churchland's 2002 Presidential address, available here.

Paul M. Churchland, 'OUTER SPACE AND INNER SPACE: THE NEW EPISTEMOLOGY'. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 76 (2002), 25-48.

The sixth is Nancy Cartwright's 2009 Presidential address, not yet available through JSTOR.

Nancy D. Cartwright, 'HOW TO DO THINGS WITH CAUSES'. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 83 (2009).

Major Publications by UCSD Philosophers 1980-1989

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Please help me make this a better list-- I know I have missed some important items.

1980: Stanley Moore, Marx on the Choice between Socialism and Communism (Cambridge, MA).

1981: Henry Allison and Nicholas Jolley, ‘Locke’s Pyrrhic Victory’, Journal of the History of Ideas 42.

1982: Robert Pippin, Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason (New Haven).

1983: Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven).

1984: Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA). Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke: a study of the New Essays on Human Understanding (Oxford). Zeno Vendler, The Matter of Minds (Oxford).

1985: Richard Arneson, ‘Marxism and Secular Faith’, American Political Science Review 7. Paul M. Churchland, ‘Reduction, qualia and the direct introspection of brain states’, Journal of Philosophy 82.

1986: Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA).

1987: Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (New Haven).

1988: Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg, C. Webel (eds.) Marcuse: Critical Theory and The Promise of Utopia.

1989: Richard Arneson, 'Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare', Philosophical Studies. Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge, MA). Gerald Doppelt, 'Is Rawl's Kantian Liberalism Coherent and Defensible?' Ethics. Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge).

Major Publications by UCSD Philosophers 1970-1979

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Please let me know what I am missing from this list.

1970: Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston).

1971: Stanley Moore, 'Hobbes on obligation, moral and political', Parts one and two: Journal of the History of Philosophy 9-10 (1971-1972).

1972: Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston). Richard Popkin and Avrum Stroll, Introduction to Philosophy (second revised edition, New York); Introductory Readings in Philosophy (New York). Edward Lee, 'Plato on Negation and Not-being in the Sophist', (The Philosophical Review).

1973: Henry Allison, The Kant-Eberhard controversy; an English translation, together with supplementary materials and a historical-analytic introduction of Immanuel Kant's On a discovery according to which any new critique of pure reason has been made superfluous by an earlier one (Baltimore). Frederick Olafson, 'Democracy, "High Culture," and the Universities', Philosophy and Public Affairs 2.

1974: Herbert Marcuse, 'Marxism and Feminism', Women's Studies 2. Frederick A. Olafson (& Robert Paul Wolff), 'Correspondence', Philosophy and Public Affairs 3.

1975: Henry Allison, Benedict de Spinoza (Boston). Stanley Moore, 'Marx and Lenin as historical materialists', Philosophy and Public Affairs 4.

1976: Edward Lee, 'Reason and Rotation: Circular Movement as the Model of Mind (nous)', Facets of Plato's Philosophy (a supplementary volume of Phronesis).

1977: Herbert Marcuse, 'Murder is not a political weapon', New German Critique 12. Stanley Moore, 'Justice and Imagination. The Necessity of Utopian Thinking to a Humane Social Order', World Futures 15. Frederick A. Olafson and Herbert Marcuse, 'Heidegger's Politics: an interview with Herbert Marcuse', Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6.

1978: Gerald Doppelt, 'Walzer's Theory of Morality in International Relations’, Philosophy and Public Affairs. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics (Boston).

1979: Herbert Marcuse, ‘Failure of the New Left’, New German Critique 18.

Frederick A. Olafson, The Dialectic of Action: a philosophical interpretation of history and the humanities (Chicago).

Fred Olafson interview of Herbert Marcuse on Heidegger's politics

2011-03-12T11:28:00.000-08:00

Herbert Marcuse (UCSD Philosophy Professor 1964-1979), was interviewed by Frederick Olafson (UCSD Philosophy Professor Emeritus 1971-present) on the topic of "Heidegger's Politics" in The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6 (1977), 20-40. The journal TOC is available here; I will update this post if I can manage to obtain or create an electronic copy.

Henry Allison appreciation

2011-03-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

Below, a notice of the extensive influence and importance for the field of philosophy of Henry Allison (UCSD Research Professor of Philosophy of Emeritus, 1974-present). It was prepared by the Harvard Review of Philosophy and edited by S. Phineas Upham, and published by UPI.com on May 14, 2002.

The history of philosophy has allegedly not fared well in American philosophy departments in this past century, but this commonplace belief is belied by the immense influence that Immanuel Kant's work continues to exercise on contemporary thinking. Philosopher Kant was most well-known for his "Copernican Revolution" idea more than 100 years ago, which introduced the idea of the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception. Many contemporary metaphysicians work in a framework forged by Kant, and would call themselves, in some sense, neo-Kantians. Kant's ethical and political writings are the backbone of the work that stands at the very center of discussions in political philosophy: John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice." After Kant, the thinkers who deserve the most credit for this ongoing Kantian renaissance are those few scholars who have been able to couple sensitive historical understanding with acute analytical abilities: foremost among these philosophers is Henry Allison.

Allison spent most of his early years in New York and its environs. Born in New York in 1937, he studied at Yale, Columbia, the Union Theological Seminary, and the New School for Social Research, where he received a doctorate in 1964. For more than two decades, Allison taught at the University of California, San Diego, where his colleagues included Frederick Olafson and Robert Pippin, and which became, during his tenure there, a locus for the historically minded study of European philosophy in America. Since 1996, Allison has taught at Boston University.

Two books are almost always assigned in courses on Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason": the "Critique" itself, and Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense." Allison's book is even more than a careful and insightful summary of the project of the "Critique." In delivering precisely what his subtitle promises, Allison resurrects Kant's theoretical philosophy, which most of his contemporaries had treated as a piecemeal assemblage of positions, as the systematic philosophy that Kant intended it to be.More important, through Allison's work, the "Critique" becomes an entirely viable philosophical system, one that holds its own against its most recent and sophisticated critics. This is not to say that Allison has convinced all of his colleagues to accept "Transcendental Idealism" -- since its publication in 1983, Allison's book has generated extensive debate. But both the idea that a book about the "Critique of Pure Reason" could ever be the subject of such debate and that one could be convinced by Kant's theoretical philosophy in its entirety would have seemed impossible before Allison's book.

"Kant's Transcendental Idealism" was followed by "Kant's Theory of Freedom," which constitutes an extended explication and defense of that theory.Published in 1990, "Kant's Theory of Freedom" deals with a problem that had occupied Allison since he was a sophomore at Yale. In 1996, Allison published "Idealism and Freedom: Essays in Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy," a work that defends and extends the thoughts put forth in his previous two works. Most recently, Allison's thinking has turned, as Kant's did, from the theoretical and the practical to the aesthetic. He recently published "Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment."

Allison's writings on Kant, however, are only one aspect of his work and thought.Allison's earliest philosophical interests lay in the work of Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, and he has continued to focus his intellect on many of the central figures in the history of philosophy, helping us to understand, in the process, why these figures are as central as they are. Allison's broad interests have brought him to study many thinkers who have not fared as well as Kant among Allison's contemporaries. His first book was "Lessing and the Enlightenment" (1966), and since then he has written dozens of articles on Gotthold Lessing, Kierkegaard, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, and George Berkeley, among others. The dissimilarity of these thinkers indicates the vast range of Allison's interests and his ability to incorporate the tangled and crossing routes that these thinkers have followed into a broad and sensitive vision of philosophy and its history. Allison is currently working on a major revision of Kant's "Transcendental Idealism" and a book on David Hume.

Volume 5 of Herbert Marcuse's Collected Papers

2011-03-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

Volume 5 of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, has been published in late 2010. There is much of interest here with regards to the history of the UCSD Philosophy Department, including a reprint of Marcuse's 1969 Presidential Address to the Pacific APA entitled 'The Relevance of Reality'; an interview with KPBS, a local San Diego radio station; and an afterward by UCSD Philosophy Alum Andrew Feenberg. In general, there is much of philosophical interest, including Marcuse's critiques of positivism and pragmatism, reflections on the philosophy of technology, and the ethics of science. Below I copy the blurb on the Routledge page, which usefully contains the table of contents (as well as links to descriptions and tables of content for the prior 4 volumes).

Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation is the fifth volume of Herbert Marcuse's collected papers. Containing some of Marcuse’s most important work, this book presents for the first time his unique syntheses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical social theory, directed toward human emancipation and social transformation.

Within philosophy, Marcuse engaged with disparate and often conflicting philosophical perspectives - ranging from Heidegger and phenomenology, to Hegel, Marx, and Freud - to create unique philosophical insights, often overlooked in favor of his theoretical and political interventions with the New Left, the subject of previous volumes. This collection assembles significant, and in some cases unknown texts from the Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, including:

critiques of positivism and idealism, Dewey’s pragmatism, and the tradition of German philosophy

philosophical essays from the 1930s and 1940s that attempt to reconstruct philosophy on a materialist base

Marcuse’s unique attempts to bring together Freud and philosophy

philosophical reflections on death, human aggression, war, and peace

Marcuse’s later critical philosophical perspectives on science, technology, society, religion, and ecology.

A comprehensive introduction by Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis and Clayton Pierce places Marcuse’s work in the context of his engagement with the main currents of twentieth century politics and philosophy. An Afterword by Andrew Feenberg provides a personal memory of Marcuse as scholar, teacher and activist, and summarizes the lasting relevance of his radical thought.

Major Publications by UCSD Philosophers 1963-1969

2011-03-10T11:40:00.001-08:00

Below is a list of the most significant publications by UCSD philosophers from the founding of the department in 1963 until the end of the 1960s. Please let me know what I have missed. I am compiling a master list of major UCSD Philosophy publications through 2010. Stay tuned for the 1970s.

1963: Richard Popkin (founding editor), Journal of the History of Philosophy (periodical); Richard Popkin and Paul Dibon (founding editors), International Archive of the History of Ideas (Book series).

1964: Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society (Boston). Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (rev. ed., Assen); 'So, Hume did read Berkeley', Journal of Philosophy.

1965: Herbert Marcuse, 'Repressive Tolerance' in R. Wolff et al. (eds.), A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston).

1966: Richard Popkin (ed.), The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York). Avrum Stroll, 'On the first flowering of Frege's reputation', Journal of the History of Philosophy 4. Jason L. Saunders, Greek and Roman Philosophy after Aristotle (New York).

1967: Paul Henry, 'Medieval Philosophy' in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York); The Logic of St. Anselm (Oxford). Stanley Moore, 'Marx and the state of nature', Journal of the History of Philosophy 5. Avrum Stroll, Epistemology: new essays in the theory of knowledge (New York); 'Censorship, models, and self government', Journal of Value Inquiry 1.

1968: Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London).

1969: Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston); Herbert Marcuse, 'The Relevance of Reality’ (Slightly expanded version of presidential address delivered before the Forty-third annual meeting of the Pacific division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Portland, Oregon, March 28, 1969), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 42. Richard Popkin, 'Comments on Professor Derrida's paper', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Richard Popkin and Avrum Stroll, The Theory of Knowledge (London).

San Diego Historical Society Photo of Marcuse

2011-03-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

Herbert Marcuse (second from left) after testifying on behalf of students at a hearing at UCSD.

A San Diego Historical Society Photo, included in a collection of their images of UCSD (link).

The Journal of San Diego History
SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Fall 2001, Volume 47, Number 4
Gregg Hennessey, Editor

The date is approximately 1966.

Can anyone identify anyone else in the photo, or any other details (such as date and exact location)?

Zeno Vendler (1921-2004)

2011-03-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

Below is an obituary of Zeno Vendler (UCSD Philosophy Professor and Professor Emeritus 1977-2004), written by two of his colleagues in the department, Avrum Stroll (Research Professor Emeritus) and Frederick Olafson (Professor Emeritus). It was printed in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 77, No. 5 (May, 2004), pp. 172-173, and is available in PDF here (JSTOR access required). It is also available in a PDF version published by the UCSD Academic senate.

ZENO VENDLER, 1921-2004

Zeno Vendler was born in Hungary in 1921. He was educated there until he joined the Society of Jesus and trained for the priesthood in Holland. His doctoral studies in philosophy were at Harvard University, where he took his degree in 1959. He left the order shortly thereafter, and taught philosophy in a number of American colleges and universities. In 1965 he was a founding member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary.

In 1973 he moved to Rice University and then, the next year, to the University of California at San Diego. After his retirement in 1989, he lived on the Oregon coast for a number of years until he returned to Hungary, where he died on January 13, 2004. He was married twice, and had a son by each marriage. Zeno was raised in a German speaking family in Hungary, and thus started out bilingual in German and Hungarian. He became fluent in Latin and Dutch during his stay in a Jesuit seminary in Holland. He fell in love with English, though he learned it relatively late. Ordinary language philosophy was thus tailor-made for Vendler's passion and reflection.

Vendler was also initiated into modern linguistics through his association with Zelig Harris. After completing his dissertation at Harvard, by lucky chance he got a position in Harris's project on grammatical transformations. Vendler regarded Harris as a true genius. The result of this tutorial was a famous monograph on adjectives and nominalizations. Vendler is well-known among linguists, most notably through two early works: "Each and Every, Any and All" and "Verbs and Times." The first is an analysis of subtle differences among four English words that correspond to universal quantifier in logic. The second concerns the often subtle effects of verb expressions on aspectual interpretation of sentences; the two terms Vendler introduced in the discussion of this topic area, 'achievement' and 'accomplishment,' have since become part of the basic technical vocabulary in modern linguistics. Both of these works have been very influential and served as sources for the later development of sophisticated and highly technical treatments of their respective topic areas. It may also be noted that Vendler's work on the order of prenominal modifiers provides a precursor to theories of parsing.

Although much of Vendler's work involved the careful analysis of everyday language, such efforts were nearly always directed toward understanding traditional philosophical issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind and language. From his earliest writings to his last book, The Matter of Minds (1984), Zeno was a defender of a sophisticated form of Cartesianism. He argued that mental phenomena were different from and irreducible to physical phenomena, and used the resources of linguistics and ordinary language to support this point of view. He was a delightful conversationalist. Zeno's passion for language was eclipsed only by his infatuation with geography. He was a great traveler; his last major trip, when he was about eighty, was a cruise to Antarctica, the last continent for him to reach. He was a dedicated and accomplished photographer. He took pride in his ability to hold the camera still long enough to take pictures in dark places without a flash or a tripod. Zeno was the author of four books and more than thirty articles and reviews. The undersigned wish to thank Ernest Lepore and S.-Y. Kuroda for their help with this obituary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Verbs and Times”, Philosophical Review 56 (1957): 143–60.
Linguistics in Philosophy (Ithaca, 1967).
Adjectives and nominalizations (The Hague, 1968).
Res cogitans: an essay in rational psychology (Ithaca, 1972).
The matter of minds. Oxford : Clarendon Press (New York, 1984).

Avrum Stroll and Frederick Olafson, University of California, San Diego

See also the obituary by Susan Fischer and S.-Y. Kuroda published in The Linguist List 15.286 (2004).

Paul Henry (1906-1984)

2011-03-07T21:15:00.000-08:00

The following is an obituary of Paul Henry (UCSD Philosophy Professor 1965?-1969) written by Richard Popkin (UCSD Philosophy Professor 1963-1973) and printed in the Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985), 453.

Paul Henry (1906-1984)

Paul Henry was a renowned scholar of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism. Born in Louvain, the son of a chemistry professor at the university there, he was sent to school in England during World War I. He then returned to Belgium, and studied philosophy and theology at Louvain, and joined the Society of Jesus. He did further studies in Paris in Middle Eastern culture, and studied Arabic in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. In Rome he did further studies and received an S.T.D. from the Pontifical Gregorian University, as well as a Licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Gregorian University. He was appointed professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He published several fundamental studies on Plotinus and the development of Neo- Platonism in Western thought. He and Hans Rudolf Schwyzer of Zurich collaborated on the critical edition of Plotinus's Enneads,and he and his former student, Pierre Hadot, produced the critical edition of the theological treatises of Marius Victorinus.

Paul Henry made his first visit to the United States in 1952 where he was a visiting profes- sor at Fordham. At a meeting of the American Philosophical Association that year he met Richard Popkin. They became close friends. This led to Henry being invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, to give the Foster lecture on the immortality of the soul at the University of California, Berkeley, and to his later being appointed a regular professor at the University of California, San Diego. He also was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Northwestern, the College of New Rochelle and St. John's University in New York.

Paul Henry was an important consultant and adviser to the Journal of the History of Philosophy in its early years. With his vast erudition, his understanding of the different kinds of scholarship being undertaken in Europe and America, in Catholic and non-Catholic institutions, he was able to assist us in finding the best scholarly articles, the best referees and reviewers of materials in many fields.

Paul Henry was a person of immense charm, vivacity and humanity. He was able to break down barriers between people of differing backgrounds, and to form deep, abiding friendships with students and scholars all over the world. He took great interest in a variety of ventures to increase learning and understanding in intellectual history. His concerns ranged from early Christian thought, pagan Neo-Platonism, the fusion of the two in Victorinus and Augustine, up to leading intellectual ideas in modern European thought such as the structuralism of Levi- Strauss and the theology of Teilhard de Chardin. He encouraged young and maturing scholars in America and Europe, and tried to bring out the very best of their abilities. He encouraged the understanding of different thought systems, the appreciation of their strengths and weak- nesses. And, perhaps as much as any one in the post-second-World-War period, he encouraged frank and open discussions between Catholic and non-Catholic scholars, and thereby built many bridges.

Those who knew him have profited immensely from his learning, wisdom and humanity. Those who worked to launch and develop theJournalare especially grateful for his help and support in the early days of this venture. We hope that his scholarship will encourage many others to develop fresh understandings of Neo-Platonism and its importance in the philosophical, theological and scientific world, from ancient times to the present. He will be sorely missed, but he has left a great legacy to those working in the history of philosophy.

RICHARD H. POPKIN

Pat Churchland's Braintrust

2011-03-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

Today's San Diego Union Tribune has an interview with Patricia Churchland (UCSD Presidential Professor of Philosophy Emeritus) about her new book Braintrust: what neuroscience tells us about morality (Princeton 2011). From the interview:

The word “braintrust” has a certain meaning for most people, but you use it in a different way here. Please explain the significance of the title.

Yes, the expression has a meaning dating back to F.D. Roosevelt’s cabinet. My use of “braintrust” evokes the fact that trust is a fundamental feature of harmonious social life, and is essential for the development of social institutions of various kinds — including markets, courts, religions, medical services, schools and guilds. And we now know a little about the neurochemical platform that enables the formation of social bonds and relationships of trust.

Richard Popkin, Founder of the UCSD Philosophy Department

2011-03-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Richard Popkin was the founding Chair of the Department of Philosophy at UCSD in 1963, and a Professor in the department from 1963-1973.

He was also the founding editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy (the first volume of which was published in 1963) and the series International Archives of the History of Ideas.

Volume 198 of the International Archives of the History of Ideas is a Festschrift entitled The Legacies of Richard Popkins (ed. Jeremy Popkin, 2008). An electronic version is available (for those with access). Of special interest is Avrum Stroll's essay "Richard Popkin and Philosophy Made Simple" which discusses an introductory philosophy textbook they wrote together (one of four; on which see here). Jeremy Popkin also provides an account of his father's tenure at UCSD on pages 277-280.

Below I have excerpted from some obituaries that I am using in my research on the history of the department.

Richard Popkin: A philosopher grappling with notions of God and scepticism

By Sarah Hutton, in The Guardian, Saturday 7 May 2005.

The History Of Scepticism (1960) revolutionised the received picture of both the history of philosophy and the history of science, by demonstrating the influence, in the century before Descartes, of ancient Greek sceptical arguments about the impossibility of knowing God and the world.
   In making his case for this central contribution to the development of modern science and philosophy, Popkin gave attention to the intellectual context of the time, especially the role of religious disputes in the take-up of philosophical scepticism deriving from the discipline's Greek founder, Pyhrro. Instead of treating the history of science and philosophy as a series of breakthroughs by canonical figures, Popkin sought to view the thought of the past from within its own framework.
   His history brought him international recognition and was translated into four languages. He expanded his thesis in later editions of the book (most recently in 2003), and in The High Road To Pyrrhonism (1989), which took the story through to David Hume. His interest in the contribution of non-philosophical strands (especially religion) to the history of philosophy led to pioneering studies of the interaction of Jewish and Christian philosophy and theology, and of topics such as kabbalism and millenarianism.
   In his many books, the originality of his approach brought new perspectives, both on little-known figures, such as the French millenarian Isaac la Peyrère and the English bible scholar Joseph Mede, and on major figures, especially Spinoza and Newton. Popkin played a major role in generating interest in Newton's legacy of non-scientific manuscripts. The Newton Project, based at Imperial College, London, and Cambridge, which is currently editing these, owes much to his initiatives.

Richard Popkin, Historian of Philosophy and Skepticism, Dies at 81

By Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times, April 19, 2005.

He expanded the <1960> work to "The History of Scepticism From Savonarola to Bayle," now in its second edition, published by the Oxford University Press in 2003. The author documents an era pivotal to Western thought, an age of doubt as well as faith.
   Besides numerous articles and book chapters, Dr. Popkin wrote and edited 36 books, often in collaboration with others. Among the many still in print are a paperback, "Spinoza," published in England last year, as well as "Third Force in 17th-Century Thought" (1991) and "Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone" (2001), written with Avrum Stoll.
   He was the editor of the Columbia History of Western Philosophy, published by the Columbia University Press in 1999, and "Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment" (1993). Also in print is "Scepticism and Irreligion in the 17th and 18th Centuries" (1993), which he edited with Arjo Vanderjagt.
   Forswearing philosophy for a spell in the 1960's, Dr. Popkin joined the chorus of doubters who prominently disputed the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In an article in The New York Review of Books and in a paperback he argued that the commission's single-assassin solution was not just implausible, but also impossible in terms of the commission's evidence.
   The book, "The Second Oswald" (Avon, 1966), promptly came under attack. Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a review in The New York Times, called it "a very hasty book, but fascinating reading."
   At his death, Dr. Popkin was working on a book about Rabbi Isaac of Troki in Lithuania, who composed a polemic against Christianity in the 16th century, and a collection of essays on philosophical skepticism.

UCSD keeps a collection of portraits of Richard Popkin.
See also the Wikipedia entry on Richard Popkin.

Four Philosophy Textbooks by Popkin and Stroll

2011-03-02T18:18:00.000-08:00

UCSD founding Philosophy Professors Avrum Stroll (1963-present; currently Emeritus Professor) and Richard Popkin (1963-1973) co-authored four important and widely used undergraduate textbooks.

The first was Philosophy Made Simple (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956). It is still in print: Three Rivers Press; 2 Rev Sub edition (July 1, 1993); and available as a Random House electronic book. This was a monographic survey of the field, divided into seven sections: (I) Ethics; (II) Political Philosophy; (III) Metaphysics; (IV) Philosophy of Religion; (V) The Theory of Knowledge; (VI) Logic; (VII) Contemporary Philosophy. It happens to be a book that I have owned since childhood, and my mother read it about five years ago when I rediscovered it in our library after I had taken a job at UCSD and realized that its authors had developed it as a textbook for the department in which I would be working. She enjoyed it. Even if it is a bit outdated, it remains a classic synthetic survey of the field, a model of concision, and it continues to serve this purpose in the age of electronic books. In this way it resembles the picture of the ruined Parthenon on its cover.

The second was Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961). It covers the same topics in greater depth and length, in a different order: (1) The theory of knowledge; (2) Metaphysics; (3) Political philosophy; (4) Ethics; (5) Philosophy of religion; (6) Contemporary philosophy. The logic section from Philosophy Made Simple has been dropped. The contemporary philosophy section of ends with J. L. Austin.

The political philosophy section of Introduction to Philosophy ends with two sections devoted to Marcuse: "Political Philosophy of Herbert Marcuse" (pp. 233-235) and "Criticism of Marcuse" (pp. 256-237). It is very interesting to think that these two UCSD Philosophers collaborated on a summary and criticism of the political philosophy of a third UCSD Philosopher, and put this as the finale of their introduction to political philosophy. I wonder to what extent the criticisms of Marcuse by his UCSD colleagues has been taken into account by Marcuse scholars. Andrew Feenberg or Douglas Kelner would be the right people to ask.

Introduction to Philosophy was later substantially revised and expanded (1972), and an accompanying sourcebook was developed and published. This was the third textbook on which Stroll and Popkin collaborated: an anthology of primary source translations entitled Introductory Readings in Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972). This work is stated to be a companion to the second edition of the Introduction to Philosophy, and divides into five sections corresponding to the five sections of that book: (I) Theory of Knowledge; (II) Metaphysics; (III) Political Philosophy; (IV) Ethics; and (V) Philosophy of Religion. Each section of the anthology contains English translations of about five classic excerpts, usually beginning with Plato or Aristotle, except the philosophy of religion section, which begins with Anselm. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Spinoza are prevalent. For theory of knowledge and metaphysics, Hume and Kant. The section on ethics ends with A. J. Ayer; on political philosophy with Marcuse. Marcuse's most famous essay Repressive Tolerance (1965) is reprinted entirely.

These textbooks clearly provide insight into the lower-division undergraduate curriculum of UCSD philosophy in the early years, from 1963 for at least the next decade. They also show that there was a vibrant interaction of the faculty, collaborating and criticizing one another. Hopefully we are still living up to creating this kind of philosophy department.

The fourth book, published twenty years ofter the first edition of Introduction to Philosophy, was Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone (Prometheus Books, 2002). The book ends with an exchange of letters between Popkin the major scholar of skepticism and Stroll a major critic of skepticism. It is very interesting to see that they developed a method of teaching philosophy increasingly centered on skepticism in the course of their long, experimental, and highly influential collaboration.

Bibliography

Popkin, R. & A. Stroll, Philosophy Made Simple (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956).
_Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961).
_Introductory Readings in Philosophy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
_Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone (Prometheus Books, 2002).

Conference: Historical Perspectives on God's Order, Man's Order and the Order of Nature

2011-03-02T17:35:00.000-08:00

My colleague Eric Watkins has organized an exciting conference taking place here this weekend. A program and other details can be found here. Below is a list of the participants, including Eric himself and Donald Rutherford, Chair of the UCSD Philosophy department.

Historical Perspectives on God's Order, Man's Order and the Order of Nature

March 4th to March 6th at UC San Diego

Organized by Eric Watkins

• Marilyn McCord Adams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Powers versus Laws: God and the Order of Nature in Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham”

• Robert Merrihew Adams, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Power, Cause, and Law in Malebranche’s Occasionalism”

• Karl Ameriks, University of Notre Dame, “Kant and the End of Theodicy”

• Martha Bolton, Rutgers University, “Leibniz on Monadic Change”

• Andrew Chignell, Cornell University, “Kant and Leibniz on Miracles”

• Daniel Garber, Princeton University, “Divine Laws and Divine Decrees: Laws of Nature in Descartes and Leibniz”

• Desmond Hogan, Princeton University, “Kant's Theory of Divine and Secondary Causation”

• Steve Nadler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “The Order of Nature and Moral Luck: Maimonides on Divine Providence”

• Donald Rutherford, University of California, San Diego, “Laws and Powers in Leibniz”

• Eric Watkins, University of California, San Diego, “Kant on Man, God, and the Order of Nature”

Update

2011-03-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

In preparation for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary celebration of UCSD, I am working on a short article, a history of the UCSD Philosophy Department, provisionally entitled "From Historical Materialism to Eliminative Materialism (via German Idealism)". Please get in touch if you might have something to add.

There has been progress on the Works page. I have got links up to the PhilPapers pages for almost everyone who has ever been on the faculty of UCSD Philosophy, and I am providing a brief list of outstanding publications produced specifically while these people were working at UCSD. Let me know if you have suggestions.

I am still working to fill out some crucial details of the Chronology. Please let me know if you can help. It is surprising how difficult the history of philosophy can be, even for just the last 50 years!

A Few More Pieces of the Marcuse Puzzle

2011-03-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

I recently became aware of this collection of documents:

University of California, San Diego, Office of the Chancellor (McGill, 1968-1970), files concerning Herbert Marcuse, Archives 941 Rec, Mandeville Department of Special Collections.

These are described in the following article:

A Few More Pieces of the Puzzle | San Diego History Center

From Abracadabra to Zombies

2010-12-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

THE SKEPTIC'S DICTIONARY is a wonderful resource, arranged alphabetically and by hyperlink, for anyone looking for briefs on such topics as "backward (satanic) messages", "chakra", "diploma mill", or almost any fraud or hoax you can think of. A great critical thinking resource. It was recently brought to my attention that its author and editor, Robert T. Carroll, is a UCSD Philosophy Department alum, as he writes on his bio page.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 1974. My doctoral dissertation was done under the direction of Richard H. Popkin and was entitled The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699). It was published by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, in 1975.

(Hat tip to Craig Callender for the pointer.)

Pat Churchland: A Platform for Morality

2010-10-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

I am happy to post an excerpt of Pat Churchland's recent contribution to The New Scientist (22 October 2010).

Morality: Brain roots of right and wrong
by Patricia Churchland

We are figuring out how the brain and its chemicals give rise to moral and social values, says Patricia Churchland

WHERE do moral values come from? Not from Plato's heaven, nor from any other. Aristotle, Confucius and Darwin all recognised valuing as a basic function of biological creatures generally, and moral valuing as a basic function of highly social and intelligent animals like humans. Until very recently, however, science could not explain how brains, built by gene networks interacting with the environment, give rise to morality.

Natural selection being what it is, caring for others must serve the fitness of the animals involved. Evolutionary biologists have developed models to show how this might work, but it is only now that neuroscientists are catching the first glimpses of how altruistic behaviour happens in the brain.

Morality seems to be shaped by four interlocking brain processes: caring, rooted in attachment to and nurture of offspring; recognition of others' psychological states, bringing the benefit of predicting their behaviour; problem-solving in a social context, such as how to distribute scarce goods or defend the clan; and social learning, by positive and negative reinforcement, imitation, conditioning and analogy. These factors result in the emergence of a conscience: a set of socially sanctioned responses to prototypical circumstances.

These four interlocking brain processes result in the emergence of a conscience
Social values, real as they are, depend on an evolutionary modification of the neural circuitry involved in basic survival. In all vertebrates, brain-stem circuitry keeps crucial parameters such as temperature and carbon dioxide and glucose levels within the right range. In order to maintain this homeostasis, the brain deploys motivations such as pain, hunger, thirst and fear, as well the complementary pleasures of food, water, sex and safety.

As the mammalian brain evolved, the homeostasis network enabling "me" to survive expanded its scope to embrace "mine", at first meaning one's own helpless offspring. Pain and anxiety responses were triggered by separation or perceived need; pleasure and comfort came with being suckled, licked and cuddled. In some species, additional adjustments in attachment circuitry widened the circle to include mates, kin and others in the group, depending on selection pressures.

At the hub of the neural circuitry of attachment are ancient peptides: oxytocin and its sibling, vasopressin. Along with other reproductive hormones and neurotransmitters, these peptides organise the circuitry in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain stem involved in attachment to "mine". Though much remains to be discovered, vasopressin seems to be related more to aggressive care, such as defence, while oxytocin dampens fear and anxiety, which feels good and is associated with trust.

The neocortex - the six-layered mantle covering the brain's hemispheres - is unique to mammals. The high cost of mammalian dependency at birth is offset by the singular advantages of new forms of learning made possible by the neocortex. In primates, the neocortex appears to be responsible for an enhanced capacity to predict others' behaviour. It also enables more abstract learning and problem-solving, as well enhanced flexibility in impulse control and social skills. These skills paved the way for the emergence of cultural institutions such as trade practices, criminal justice systems and religions - all of which served to regulate trust among non-kin and allow for a wider range of trusting relationships than isolated hunter-gathering groups could offer. In short, the brain's regulation of attachment and bonding is what makes us want to be together, to care for one another, and to value our family, friends and community. The interplay of our neural and cultural institutions comprises our moral history.

Patricia Churchland is a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California and the Salk Institute, both in San Diego. Her book, Braintrust: What neuroscience tells us about morality, will be published by Princeton University Press in March 2011

The FBI book reports on Marcuse

2010-09-19T20:38:00.000-07:00

As part of our research into the history of the UCSD Philosophy Department, we requested and obtained, from the FBI and DOJ, the Freedom of Information Act file on Dr. Herbert Marcuse. We received in the mail a disc containing a 607 page pdf file; all of which were documents concerning Marcuse. A large portion of the file is in regard to the death threat that Marcuse received July 1, 1968 (more info here). The rest of the file is information regarding the tracking of and following Marcuse for several decades, from the 1940s until the 1970s.

Much of the file is in regard to surveillance of Marcuse's movements around the world, categorized under sub subjects as: "Anarchy", or "New Left Matter". The FBI received many complaints from San Diego citizens who felt that Marcuse was dangerous to society and should not be in a position to influence others. The FBI even received tips from Marcuse's La Jolla neighbors on his whereabouts and travel plans/patterns.

The FBI actually commissioned book reports to be done on several of Marcuse's published works. Below are the actual reports for "Reason and Revolution", "One Dimensional Man", and "Essay on Liberation" from Marcuse's file.

"Reason and Revolution"

Reason and Revolution Report

"One Dimensional Man"

One Dimensional Man Report

"Essay on Liberation"

Essay on Liberation Report

There are many pages omitted in the Freedom of Information act file on Marcuse, that is, there are several documents not released to the public. Names of sources and many other people are also blacked out of the documents. This leaves the door open to many questions about who exactly was communicating with the FBI about Marcuse and what exactly is too sensitive to be released to the public. Another interesting note is that the file grew nearly forty pages from the day we first requested it to the day we actually received it; leading us to believe that the file on Marcuse, even now in 2010, is still growing.

Featured Publication: Eric Watkins' Sourcebook for Kant's First Critique

2010-09-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

In the upcoming months, I will be featuring works published by philosophers while they were or are professors at UCSD, beginning with a major new scholarly resource produced by Eric Watkins: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Material (Cambridge, 2009). The front matter and some other material is available at the official page at Cambridge University Press. The work has also been recently reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Below is the blurb and a short bio from the CUP page.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials

This volume offers English translations of texts that form the essential background to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Presenting the projects ofKant’s predecessors and contemporaries in eighteenth-century Germany, it enables readers to understand the positions that Kant might have identified with “pure reason,” the criticisms of pure reason that had been developed prior to Kant’s, and alternative attempts at synthesizing empiricist elements within a rationalist framework. The volume contains chapters on Christian Wolff, Martin Knutzen, Alexander Baumgarten, Christian Crusius, Leonhard Euler, Johann Lambert, Marcus Herz, Johann Eberhard, and Johann Tetens. Each chapter includes a brief introduction that provides succinct biographical and bibliographical information on these authors, a concise account of their projects, and information on the importance of these projects to Kant’s first Critique. Extensive references to the firstCritique, brought together in a concordance, highlight the potential relevance of each text.

Eric Watkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he is the author of Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, which won the Book Prize in 2005 from the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Celebrating the Churchlands

2010-09-17T21:09:00.000-07:00

Pat and Paul Churchland have officially retired from the philosophy department at UCSD, but Pat has assured me that they will continue to "haunt us" (her words). Eliminative materialist ghosts are the best kind.

If you haven't already seen it, be sure to read the 2007 New Yorker feature on the Churchlands (full text available here; abstract below) entitled "Two Heads". The article explains how the two are able to maintain psychic unity even at a distance-- it's a bit mysterious, but there is some perfectly reasonable materialist explanation, I can assure you.

On page 59 of the magazine is a fine picture of them together, hydra-like, taken by Steven Pyke and included in his series of portraits of famous philosophers, entitled Philosophers II (Pyke also took a portrait of Richard Arneson, which I mentioned in an earlier post). Pyke also took these beautiful portraits of their individuated avatars.

Larissa MacFarquhar. "Annals of Science, 'Two Heads', The New Yorker, Feb. 12, 2007, p. 58-69.

ABSTRACT: PROFILES of Paul and Patricia Churchland. Paul and Patricia Churchland are in their early sixties and are both professors of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego (U.C.S.D.). They have been talking about philosophy together since they met; they test ideas on each other and criticize each other’s work. Some of their ideas are quite radical. The guiding obsession of their lives is the mind-body problem, or how to understand the relationship between conscious experience and the brain. In the past, everyone was a dualist. Nowadays, few people doubt that the mind somehow is the brain. Paul and Pat Churchland believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists. Describes Pat’s childhood and background; she attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she met Paul, and Oxford. Describes Paul’s background; as a child he was influenced by the science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein. Mentions Wilfrid Sellars. Describes their jobs as professors at the University of Manitoba in the early 1970s. Mentions Pat’s study of the “split brain.” Mentions Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Pat disagreed with Nagel’s assertion that science could never understand consciousness. She also objected to the prevelant notion that neuroscience would never be relevant to philosophical concerns. In the early 1990s, Australian philosopher David Chalmers developed a theory of consciousness as a universal primitive, like mass or space. Mentions Francis Crick and the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for making the link between the mind-body problem and the brain. Pat and Paul are currently studying the implications of neuroscience for ethics and the law. Much of Paul’s work is focused far into the future. Both he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English are replaced by scientific words. As people learn to speak differently, they’ll learn to experience and think differently. Paul believes that someday language will disappear altogether and people will communicate by thought. If so, a philosopher might come to know what it’s like to be a bat.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/12/070212fa_fact_macfarquhar#ixzz0z3Z0THhR

Dick Arneson photographed by Steve Pyke

2010-09-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

Our very own Richard Arneson has been photographed by Steve Pyke for inclusion in his collection of portraits of famous philosophers, entitled Philosophers II. The photos are accompanied by short quotations from the philosophers.

"At UC Berkeley in 1967, when I started graduate school in philosophy, you could hardly avoid the question: What conception of social justice makes most sense? I have always resisted answers that suppose a society could be just and fair independently of whether or not its members are leading genuinely good lives."

The Death Threat against Marcuse in 1968

2010-09-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

Shortly after Dr. Herbert Marcuse received a death threat at his home in La Jolla on July 1, 1968, the FBI, US Postal Service, and the media descended on San Diego. Below is a Xerox copy of the actual note (contained in the FBI file on Marcuse, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request).

According to a July 1, 1968 article in the Los Angeles Times entitled "'New Left' UC Professor Flees Home After Death Threat", Marcuse first took the letter as a prank and was inclined to ignore it, until July 3 when his telephone service was disconnected by an anonymous call. Marcuse, alarmed by the phone service incident, decided to leave his home with his wife on July 4.

The intrepid Marcuse was not, however, to be permanently ousted from San Diego. A Los Angeles Times article entitled "New Left Teacher Declares He Won't Quit Despite Death Note", published July 12, 1968, describes Marcuse's intentions after the threat: mainly, that he will return to teach in the fall. The same article also gives an account of UCSD philosophy chair Jason Saunders telling reporters that Marcuse had said, "I will not run away. I will not be intimidated".

Shortly after the death threat, Revelle College administrators and faculty expressed overwhelming support for Marcuse. About a month later in an Aug. 11, 1968 Los Angeles Times article, entitled "UC San Diego Faculty Backs Dr. Marcuse", gives a detailed account of this support. The Academic Senate of UC San Diego endorsed a statement to Chancellor McGill which read:

"Prof. Marcuse is a distinguished political philosopher, whose proactive writings have stirred controversy all over the world. We know him as a man of integrity and as an outstanding teacher. We wish to assure him and our chancellor of our complete support against the attempt to silence him, whether they be well-intentioned citizens, by persons capitalizing on false rumors to agitate public sentiment or by making threats against his person. The reputation of the University of California and of the San Diego community are at stake. We are confident that a great majority of the public supports us in our determination to develop in San Diego an outstanding university, free of violence or threats of violence and dedicated to the principles of freedom of expression and of scholarship, without which a democratic society cannot long survive."

Marcuse did indeed return in September to teach and continued to receive outspoken support from the UCSD Faculty and Staff. He taught at the University for several years after this incident and maintained an office on Revelle campus as "professor honorar", working with graduate students at the University until his death in 1979.

Works Cited

Keen, Harold and William Tully. "'New Left' UC Professor Flees Home After Death Threat". Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1968, p. 3-4.

Anonymous. "New Left Teacher Declares He Won't Quit Despite Death Note". Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1968, p. 3.

Anonymous. "UC San Diego Faculty Backs Dr. Marcuse". Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11, 1968, p. H8.

Craig Callender in Scientific American and on TV

2010-09-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

We here at UCSD Philosophy are all very proud of our colleague Craig Callender's recent article in Scientific American (June 2010): "Is Time an Illusion?" You can get a preview of the article online. Unfortunately, it turns out that time is real, although it is something of a consolation to hear that it is not fundamental.

Craig is also shown on "Philosophy TV" debating Johnathan Schaffer on various topics of metaphysics (or, er, meta-metaphysics-- can't we just get back to physics?)-- check out the streaming online video.

Great job Craig! You've got a face made for internet television blogs.

Alternatives: Summer 1966

2010-08-31T16:03:00.000-07:00

Alternatives was a magazine produced by graduate students in the philosophy department at UCSD (edited by Andrew Feenberg). You can access the first issue here. The second issue contains several articles of interest, including: an essay by Linus Pauling "To Live as Men"; Part II of Marcuse's essay "The Individual in the Great Society"; an essay on "Marxism and Christianity" by former UCSD Philosophy professor and Jesuit priest Paul Henry, and an essay on "Viet Nam and the Home Front" by ex-Senator Wayne Morse. There is also a letter to the editor by Günther Anders, some photos of the UCSD campus, and an advertisement for an Alan Watts seminar (p. 39).

Alternatives Summer 1966

First hand accounts of Marcuse's undergraduate teaching

2010-08-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

A pair of articles appearing in 1969 in the Los Angeles Times describe the excitement and intensity of Herbert Marcuse's undergraduate classes at UCSD.

Art Seidenbaum in a Los Angeles Times article entitled "The Trouble with Students" gives an interesting first hand account of the author's first time meeting with Dr. Herbert Marcuse and the subsequent lecture on Freud which he attended.

The story begins with a random student telling Seidenbaum: "Hey, if you're gonna get to know this place, you ought to hear Marcuse". Art plans to hear Marcuse and so the story continues: "This is the day Herbert Marcuse's undergraduate class meets. Marcuse is the most controversial philosopher in California, the synthesizer of Freud and Marx whose books have become working manuals for American student revolutionaries".

Art makes his way to a UCSD info desk and asks where he can find Marcuse, "the information executive hesitates. Then he reminds me that Marcuse has received death threats". He continues, "the executive calls his secretary who calls Marcuse's secretary who promises to check with the professor himself". Art gets the go-ahead and makes his way to Marcuse's office, he is given a ONE-TIME ONLY pass. The following is the interesting re-telling of Art's first meeting with Marcuse:

"As I thank the secretary, in walks a slightly-stooped, gray-haired sparrow of a man who starts to pour himself a cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. The secretary smiles at me and nods at him, meaning Dr. Marcuse is among us. When he turns to face her with his coffee she introduces me. We shake hands, and he asks if I have any "devices" with me. I have no idea what he means but I open my briefcase so that he can look inside where there are only pads and pencils. He explains that he meant recording equipment. And then, in a soft, paternal voice he apologizes. He is embarrassed for having asked and I am embarrassed too".

After their introduction Art attends Marcuse's undergraduate course entitled "The Present Age" which he recounts as being "in the basement of the humanities building" and that there were "graduate student guards at the doors".

"The room is fan shaped and full. An American flag stands behind the lectern. The students are predominantly freshman, mostly clean-cutters by the lengths of hair and skirts. Dr. Marcuse comes in a few minutes after the hour and his first remark is a request: 'Would you please not smoke in this room. There have been many complaints. So repress. Repress.' He rolls his 'R's' and the students giggle over repression while the philosopher wipes his glasses. The kids lean forward, expectantly. Todays lecture is basic Freud, all about man's instinctive need for pleasure versus civilization's restraint and repression of pleasure. Marcuse walks as he talks, constantly taking off his glasses and wiping them. He is cordial enough but hardly rousing as he describes the primal horde and goes on to define ego, id and superego. 'From time to time', Marcuse says, 'the primordial force breaks through the repressions of civilization; sons may band together, as in the primal horde, to revolt against the father. Witness the generation gap.' The pimpled boy next to me snickers. Marcuse continues: 'Man's basic drives are sex and aggression. Both are in constant antagonism. There is no such thing as a self-preservation instinct; the need for pleasure supercedes self-preservation'. Then, still using the same mild tone, still wiping his glasses, Marcuse concludes, 'Aggression in man must sooner or later destroy him--as we shall see next time.' The guru of the revolution is a gentle, repressed personality, I realize. Certainly less aggressive than his critics."

The ending of the lecture concludes Art's encounter with Dr. Marcuse. The narrative tells a rich and detailed, albeit short, account of a reporter meeting Prof. Marcuse and attending one of his lectures; a rare insight into the behind-the-scenes life of a celebrity philosopher.

In another LA Times piece entitled "Herbert Marcuse: Accentuating the Negative", published July 27, 1969, Roger Rapoport gives details of an interview with Erica Sherover, doctoral candidate at the time as well as Marcuse's research assistant (and future wife), as well as another short snippet of a lecture with Dr. Marcuse; the article gives further insight into his teaching methods and personality.

Erica Sherover, speaking about how Dr. Marcuse generates a healthy amount of academic turmoil in the classroom, is quoted as saying, "He's at his best when dealing with leftists who've swallowed a lot of jargon. They expound theories and he says, 'What do you mean by that?' He forces them to expose their ignorance".

Rapoport goes on to give details of a "Marx and Lenin" lecture he sat in on:

"In class, Marcuse comes on like like a Teutonic master. Ready to convene a 'Marx and Lenin' lecture, he silences gossiping students by coming up from behind and poking them gently with his pointer. He begins class by promoting an extracurricular discussion of the SDS leaflet that has attacked his teaching methods. 'Could we meet next monday night?' he says afterwards. Student heads nod, but one boy laments: 'That's the night of the jazz concert.' 'Very well,' says Marcuse. 'We shall put the two together.' After the laughter subsides, Marcuse lectures on Marxian theory: 'Moral judgements do not play any role in capitalism. The theory calls for a specific social and political practice. There's not the slightest indication in Marx of capitalist conspiracy of the upper class. There is no theory of the evil character of capitalists. Even if all capitalists are angels, there would still be disintegration and a need for radical change.'"

Works Cited

Rapoport, Roger. "Herbert Marcuse: Accentuating the Negative". Los Angeles Times, Jul 27, 1969, p. N12-15.

Seidenbaum, Art. "The Trouble With Students". Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1969, p. M9-14.

Repressive Tolerance at UCSD? Undergraduate speaker controversy occasioned a neglected Los Angeles Times piece by Marcuse

2010-08-14T18:12:00.000-07:00

A strange episode at UCSD in 1970 resulted in an interesting set of articles published in the Los Angeles Times, including one by Herbert Marcuse that we do not find on his official bibliography or on the website marcuse.org. In it, Marcuse defends his doctrine of repressive tolerance in the context of a controversy about teaching at UCSD.

The essay "Repressive Tolerance", originally written in 1965 and found in its entirety as printed in the book A Critique of Pure Tolerance in 1969, advocates intolerance toward groups that are generally harmful, or, themselves intolerant. For Marcuse, the liberal ideal of "tolerance" should not be extended to groups like the Right Wing who are themselves intolerant of other groups. He states, "Given this situation, I suggested in 'Repressive Tolerance' the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed". An episode at UCSD shows Marcuse practicing the doctrine, by using a Right Wing speaker's lack of credentials to cast into doubt his right to address a group of college students earning credit for a course.

The issue began when Marcuse protested the coming appearance of Dr. Fred Schwarz, the president of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Schwarz was invited by UCSD (tracking down exactly who) to give the lead off lecture for a course entitled "Conservative and Traditional Views of Contemporary Issues". In a letter to Dr. Martin Chamberlain, director of UCSD extension (a letter which we are trying to locate) Marcuse stated that Schwarz' visit was, "an insult to the intelligence of any serious audience, a mockery of conservative thought". Marcuse said Schwarz was described in a book (the title of which we hope is in his letter to Chamberlain) as "a hate-monger and rabble-rouser". These events are described in an article entitled "Marcuse Protests Anti-Red Lectures at UC San Diego" written by a staff writer at the LAT (published on March 27, 1970).

In response, Dr. William Banowsky, who at the time was the Chancellor of the new campus of Pepperdine College, wrote an article entitled "An Unwitting Score for Tolerance", published in the LAT April 5, 1970. The article was meant to be a direct blow to Marcuse's doctrine of repressive tolerance. Banowsky says that Marcuse's objection "misses the point" and that he (Marcuse) "may have unintentionally scored a point for the other side". Banowsky essentially calls Marcuse a hypocrite for denying his opponent the right to speak yet affirming his own; Banowsky asserts that repressive tolerance essentially means 'tolerate my view, and not yours'.

Marcuse responded in the LAT on April 12, 1970, an article entitled "The True Nature of Tolerance". The article begins: "Regrettably, Dr. Banowsky shares in the customary misrepresentation of my opinions. I did not deny Dr. Fred Schwarz right to be heard on campus; I denied his qualification to appear as a lecturer in a accredited course". He goes on to say, " I did not invoke my "political philosophy" in protest to Schwarz because it does not apply: I do not consider him dangerous - just not qualified". Marcuse then goes on to further explicate and defend the notion of repressive tolerance. Marcuse states, "Nowhere have I argued for intolerance of all views opposed to mine, nowhere have I implied that I am in possession of 'absolute truth'. I have suggested withdrawal of tolerance from demonstrably aggressive and destructive movements on the Right." But the real point of the article is in making the distinction of WHY exactly Marcuse protested Schwarz' appearance in the first place. It wasn't that Marcuse disagreed with Schwarz and therefore didn't want an opposing view to be heard on campus; his protest was instead directed toward Schwarz' credibility.

Works Cited

Anonymous. "Marcuse Protests Anti-Red Lectures at UC San Diego", LAT March 27, 1970, p. 3.

Banowsky, W. "An Unwitting Score for Tolerance", LAT April 5, 1970, p. E7.

Marcuse, H. "Repressive Tolerance" 1965, in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp.95-137. Available online at: http://marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm, includes Herbert's 1968 'Postscript'.

Marcuse, H. "The True Nature of Tolerace", LAT April 12, 1970, p. D7.

Exile on Thorn Street

2010-08-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

UCSD graduate students under the direction of Herbert Marcuse started a number of journals, including the philosophy journal Alternatives, which I discussed in an earlier post. Lowell Bergman, Angela Davis and others started the Street Journal and San Diego Free Press (see the Library of Congress entry here; we are researching those journals and will post more later).

For these efforts they, predictably, suffered repression at the hands of San Diego police and probably federal agencies including the FBI and CIA as well (at least according to this 2006 U.S. News and World Report article). They were aided and supported by heroic San Diego Superior Court judge Roger Ruffin, about whom I also wrote about in a recent post.

It seems that they headquartered at the historic Franz Merzman House, at Second Avenue and Thorn Street, near downtown and Balboa Park, according to this San Diego Union Tribune piece. One can see a picture of the house here on google maps. I am interested in this detail because I happen to live on Thorn Street myself, though on the other side of the park.

Roger Ruffin: 1927-2010; outspoken defender of radical UCSD philosophers

2010-08-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

Roger Ruffin, who died earlier this year, was a San Diego Superior Court judge who defended Herbert Marcuse against critics, and helped UCSD philosophy postdoc Lowell Bergman (who was Marcuse's student) and others dealing with police repression in San Diego, especially in connection with the radical San Diego Street Journal. He was evidently a very colorful character, friend of Andy Warhol, and appeared in several art-house movies. An obituary in the San Diego Union Tribune quotes Bergman and provides some further details.

Lance: can you see if there are any references to Ruffin in Under the Perfect Sun? If so, please give us page references.

Guest Blogger: Lance Winsaft

2010-08-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

Over the next couple of weeks, UCSD undergraduate philosophy major Lance Winsaft will be posting to the blog and augmenting the bibliography in connection with a research project on the history of UCSD philosophy department he is undertaking to fulfill a Sixth College requirement. He has already turned up some interesting things on Herbert Marcuse and the early history of the department by researching the archives of the Los Angeles Times. Stay tuned for recollections of Marcuse's undergraduate teaching at UCSD, reflection on an incident at UCSD exemplifying Marcuse's doctrine of repressive tolerance, and a description of the bomb threat against Marcuse in July 1968, among other things.

Donald Rutherford the fourteenth Chair of Philosophy at UCSD

2010-07-19T22:39:00.001-07:00

Donald Rutherford has been appointed fourteenth Chair of the Philosophy department at UCSD. Don specializes in the history of philosophy, especially Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. Recently, he is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2006) and has edited and translated (with Brandon Look) The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence (Yale, 2007).

You can learn more about Don's work at his homepage by pointing your browser to: http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/rutherford/

Frederick A. Olafson

2010-06-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

Later this summer I will be conducting an interview with Fred Olafson, chair of the UCSD Philosophy department from 1972-1976. Fred received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1951. He is the author of many substantial books and articles, primarily in social and political philosophy, existentialism, and philosophy of mind. His thesis was titled, "A Study in the Physicalistic Theory of Mind." His influences are Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Husserl.

Some of his major works include: Society, Law and Morality (1961), Justice and Social Policy (1961), Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism (1967), Ethics and Twentieth Century Thought (1973), The Dialectic of Action: A Philosophical Interpretation of History and the Humanities (1979), Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (1987), and What Is a Human Being? A Heideggerian View (1995); Humanism & Philosophy: The Relationship Past, Present and Future (2008). Some of his publications are available electronically over at Phil Papers.

Stay tuned for the interview and more on Frederick Olafson's philosophical work.

Chairs

2010-05-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

SEE NOW THE UPDATED CHRONOLOGY PAGE which is more accurate.

I think that I have now succeeded in determining the dates and names of all the chairs of the UCSD philosophy, from its founding to the present day.

1963-1966 Richard Popkin
1966-1967 Avrum Stroll (Acting Chair)
1967-1968 Richard Popkin

1968-1969 Jason Saunders
1969-1972 Avrum Stroll
1972-1976 Frederick Olafson
1976-1978 Edward Lee
1978-1982 Henry Allison
1982-1986 Georgios Anagnostopoulos
1986-1990 Paul Churchland
1990-1992 Robert Pippin
1992-1996 Richard Arneson
1996-1998 Patricia Kitcher
1998-2000 Georgios Anagnostopoulos
2000-2007 Patricia Churchland
2007-2010 David Brink

Alternatives: The New Magazine of Politics and Society

2010-05-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

Alternatives was a journal of social and political philosophy produced "by the students of the Independent Left of the University of California, San Diego". The first issue (March-april 1966; posted below) was edited by Andrew Feenberg and had articles by Hans Meyerhoff, Barry Commoner, Herbert Marcuse, Gunther Anders, and others.

Alternatives March-April 1966

Richard Popkin's recollections of hiring Marcuse at UCSD

2010-05-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

The following note from Richard Popkin was posted to the guestbook over at marcuse.org. In it he describes the conditions of Marcuse's hire at UCSD.

Posted On: August 03, 2003 09:59:06 PM
Name: richard and juliet popkin
Comments: Richard Popkin was the chair of the philosophy department at UCSD from 1963 to 1968 and took the initiative, with Avrum Stroll, to invite Herbert Marcuse, Stanley Moore, Lewis Feuer and Joseph Tussman to speak at a symposium on Marxism. This led to Marcuse's being invited to become a member of the philosophy department in 1965. Marcuse was delighted with the intellectual and natural environment in La Jolla. The philosophy department that Popkin envisaged was far more diverse than other American departments at that time. We have many memories of Marcuse and some correspondence from our interactions with Herbert, his second wife Inge and his third wife Erica Sherover.

Erica Sherover's recollection of graduate seminars with Marcuse

2010-05-05T19:14:00.000-07:00

Erica Sherover (1938-1988) was a graduate student at UCSD in the late sixties, and in this letter to Harold Marcuse (Herbert Marcuse's grandson) she recollects philosophy seminars with Herbert Marcuse at UCSD in which they "read 150 pages of Hegel or Kant in a whole year in a two semester seminar". She married Marcuse in 1976. Her obituary ran in the New York Times.

The Churchlands' retirement message

2010-05-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

The following message was composed by Paul Churchland at the request of David Brink and published in the UCSD Philosophy Department Newsletter Winter/Spring 2010. It contains a description of their arrival in the department in 1994, the hires that happened during their tenure, and their role in establishing the Cognitive Studies department and Science Studies Program. Happily, it also declares their intention to keep an office and continue to "haunt" the department.

A  Retrospective  on  26  Years  at  UCSD 

By  Paul  Churchland 

David  (Brink)  suggested  that  Pat  and  I  pen  something  brief,  for  the  Newsletter,  given  our  upcoming  retirement  later  this  Spring.   In  truth,  much  the  same  giddy  amazement  attends  our  leaving  our  two  positions  as  characterized  our  original  arrival  to  them.   The  doors  then  opened  to  us, both  by  the department  and  by  the  campus  academic  community  at  large,  transformed  our  personal  and  intellectual  lives  forever.    The  accumulated  legacy  of  the  intervening  years  leaves  us  stunned,  even  now,  by  the  many  marvelous things that have happened.   Allow  us  a  brief  summary  of  why  we  are  still  smiling  from  ear to  ear.    The  dept.  that  wooed  us,  in  1984,  was  already  well‐balanced  in  its  ideological  profile  and  decidedly  gifted  in  its  membership.    We  were  proud,  even  chuffed,  to  be  welcomed  into  it.    It  was  also  a  profound  pleasure  to  finally  be  back  on  the  West  Coast,  after  20  years  of  purgatory  Back  East,  in  England,  and  on  the  snow‐driven  Great  Plains.    But  change  came  quickly.    Mark  Wilson,  a  gifted  philosopher  of  science,  was  pirated  away  by  Chicago,  and  we  soon  acquired  Pat  and  Philip  Kitcher  from  Minnesota,  Stephen  Stich  from  Maryland,  and  eventually,  Sandy  Mitchell  from  Pittsburgh.    Francis  Crick  had  made  Pat  an  Adjunct  Professor  at  the  Salk  Institute,  and  we  quickly  made  friends  with  the  neurocomputationalist  Terry  Sejnowski,  the  psychologist  V.S.  Ramachandran,  and  many  other  local scholars.  Those  early  years  were  a  time  of  heady  expansion  on  the  campus  as  a  whole,  and  we  were  lucky  to  participate  in  the  formation  of  the  interdisciplinary  Cognitive  Science  Ph.D.  Program,  and indeed,  in  the  founding  of  the  current  Cognitive  Science  Department  itself.   Inspired  by  that  success,  Jerry  (Doppelt),  Sandy,  Philip,  and  I  subsequently  teamed  up  with  our  distinguished  colleagues  in  History  and  Sociology  to  found  the  interdisciplinary  Science  Studies  Ph.D. Program,  a  program  that  continues  to thrive  today.   Being  Chair  of  the  dept.  during  that  formative  period  was,  for  me,  an  (almost)  unalloyed pleasure. 

As  the  90s  dawned,  however,  financial  woes  gripped  the  campus,  retirements  took  many  departmental  icons  from  us  (Zeno  Vendler,  Ed  Lee,  Fred  Olafson,  Avrum  Stroll,  Henry Allison),  Chicago  lured  Bob  Pippen  away,  and  Stich  and  the  Kitchers  were  also  lured  back  to  their  eastern  roots.    Later  in  that  period,  we  even  lost  Nick  Jolley  to  Syracuse.   Fortunately,  the  people  who  remained,  and  the  high quality  of  our  philosophy  graduate  students,  made  being  here  a  reliable  pleasure;  our  own  philosophical  research  was  flourishing  as  never  before  (we’ll  spare  you  a  summary);  and  in  that  period  we  did  manage  to  convince  David  (Brink),  Gila  (Sher),  Rick  (Grush),  and  Michael  (Hardimon)  to  join  us.    As  well,  the  Administration  wisely  determined  to  help  the  department  replace  its  many  losses  and  regain  its  former  glory.    On  the  strength  of  such  promises,  Pat  agreed  to  be  Chair,  and  the  following  years  saw  a  second  great  burst  of  hiring.    Clark  Glymour,  Nancy  (Cartwright),  Bill  (Bechtel),  Jonathan  (Cohen),  Don  (Rutherford),  Eric  (Watkins),  Craig  (Callender),  Sam  (Rickless),  Dana  (Nelkin),  and  Chris  (Wuthrich)  came  in  a  steady  rush,  and  the  department’s  reputation  shot  back  up  again.    With  the  recent  arrivals  of  Monte  (Johnson),  Clinton  (Tolley),  and  now  Saba  (Bazargan),  we  are  once  again  made  whole.    We  wouldn’t  trade  this  dept.  for  any  other  in  the  world. 

And  we  won’t.    Except  for  summer  holidays,  Pat  and  I  will  remain  in  San  Diego  and  continue  our  research  and  writing  in  your  extended  and  uniquely  valuable  company.   David  has  kindly  promised  us  a  joint  office  in  the  dept.,  as  long  as  resources  permit,  and  we  will  continue  to  haunt  the  dept.’s  Friday colloquiums.   There  is  too  much  here  to  ever  walk  away  from.   May  your  own  time  here  at  UCSD  be  as rewarding  to  you  as  ours  has  been  to  us. 

The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume Three (ed. D. Kellner)

2010-05-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

The third volume of Douglas Kellner's edition of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse (London and New York, 2005), entitled Herbert Marcuse: The New Left and the 1960s is rich in precious documentary sources on Marcuse's tenure in the Philosophy Department at UCSD, including:

1. "Reflections on the French Revolution" (p. 41-46), a widely circulated set of comments on the May 1968 French student uprising. According to Kellner, "Professor Herbert Marcuse was in Paris when the current French crisis began, between May 6 and May 12. On returning, he spoke about his impressions of the French situation to several hundred students and faculty members at The University of California at San Diego where he teaches philosophy" (p. 40-41).

2. "A September 12, 1968 letter from Herbert Marcuse to the University of California, San Diego faculty senate, on Czechoslovakia and Vietnam" (p. 118-119 and n.1). Addressed to Walter Munk.

3. "A July 19, 1968 testimony from the University of California at San Diego Department of Philosophy on Herbert Marcuse's seventieth birthday" (p. 119-120 and n.2). It is not clear who the author was, and the entire speech is in third person and speaks for the department as a whole. The statement shows how staunchly the Philosophy Department supported Marcuse. I plan to comment on the statement at greater length later.

4. "Translation of a September 18, 1968 letter from T. W. Adorno to the University of California, San Diego, Department of Philosophy on Herbert Marcuse" (p. 120-121 and n.3). The letter is addressed to Jason Saunders.

5. "The 'interview with Dr. Herbert Marcuse by Harold Green'...broadcast on San Diego KFMB-TV on February 25, 1969" (p. 128-136).

6. "'A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse'...a transcript of a P.B.S. interview with Bill Moyers on March 12, 1974" (p. 154-164). The interview was conducted in the library of Marcuse's La Jolla home.

7. "'Thoughts on Judaism, Israel, etc., ...'...published in a University of California San Diego Jewish student publication L'Chayim (Winter 1977)" (p. 179-191).

8. An Afterword by George Katsiaficas entitled "Marcuse as Activist: reminiscences on his theory and practice" (p. 192-203). Katsiaficas was a graduate student of Marcuse's at UCSD.

J.-P. Sartre's and T. W. Adorno's letters of reference to UCSD about Marcuse

2010-05-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

Many famous philosophers, including J.-P. Sartre and T. W. Adorno, wrote letters to the UCSD department chair in favor of Herbert Marcuse. I have not been able to locate either of the two letters referred to in this post (but am working on it).

The first is a testimony about a letter written by Jean-Paul Sartre, mentioned in Jim Miller's 2003 essay "Just another day in paradise?" (p. 397, footnote 412; see bibliography tab for details).

As professor of literature Carlos Blanco, who was on the budget committee when Marcuse's promotion came up, recalls in an interview dated August 19, 2002, that the committee, in order to make it crystal clear that Marcuse was more than qualified to not only continue on at UCSD, but be promoted as well, asked for assessments of Marcuse from all over the world. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, wrote, "Why are you asking me about Herbert Marcuse? Don't you know who he is?"

Douglas Kellner in the third volume of his edition of the Collected Works of Herbert Marcuse (2005, p. 120-121; see bibliography tab for details) has translated a letter of recommendation written by Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) to Jason Saunders, then chair of the Philosophy department at UCSD.

September 18, 1968

   Professor Jason L. Saunders, Chairman
   Department of Philosophy
   University of California
   San Diego, California 92037 [sic]

My Dear Professor Saunders:

With sincere thanks I acknowledge your letter of August 21 and thank you for the confidence which it expresses.

It is with the greatest joy that I express my opinion about Herbert Marcuse, for many years my colleague at The Institute for Social Research, and my old friend. I have the highest opinion about his intellectual qualities as well as his humane and moral integrity. His power of thought and intellectual energy, his opposition to all the "mechanisms of stupefication" [sic] to which we are exposed today, speak for themselves. There is no particular need to acknowledge and comment on his fame. For myself, I can only say that during the course of a life-long friendship, his outstanding productive abilities have proved themselves without any sign of a diminution of his intellectual powers. And, my vote should perhaps have a certain weight inasmuch as I have known him and thought so highly of him for a long time, and long before world-wide recognition thrust his name into prominence. But, I can most emphatically assure you that even that recognition has not spoiled him in the slightest, and that he has not changed at all. He is altogether without conceit and without pretension, as only truly great men can permit themselves to be.

Perhaps I should add that Herbert is, as I am myself, opposed to the violence which manifests itself as one form of the universal repression which we both fear. His sense of reality and his profound sense of humor protect him from evaluating any movement out of proportion to the actual balance of power. He has maintained his independence from the so-called extra-parliamentary opposition in Germany as publicly and as unflinchingly as he has opposed the threatening reaction in the Western World, and just as he has always opposed the Communist terror. He and I are in agreement in our fundamental positions, although these have developed independently. Thus, I do not feel that I am a blind partisan when I speak so strongly on his behalf. I must say that his age certainly presents no difficulty; I have never yet seen a man of 70 who in every aspect, and to an almost unbelievable degree, has so preserved his youth.

These words represent my spontaneous reaction to your letter. Should there be any need for document [sic] which would be something more of the character of a formal statement and which should be written in English, please let me know as soon as possible. Of course, I would reply immediately. I hope with all my heart that this letter will serve your purpose.

With very best wishes, I remain devotedly,

Theodor W. Adorno

Marcuse's Presidential Address to the Pacific APA, 1969

2010-05-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a link via the indispensable marcuse.org to Herbert Marcuse's Address to the American Philosophical Association at its Forty-third annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, March 28, 1969, entitled: "The Relevance of Reality".
The paper begins with Thales, the original philosopher according to the Aristotelian tradition. Yet the paper is through and through focused on the present and concrete proposals for change.

Marcuse in America- Exile as Educator

2010-05-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

Recent article by Charles Reitz in Fast Capitalism 5.2 (2009) argues that Marcuse was a decisive influence on post-war Academia in the US, especially through the invention and advancement of "critical theory". He also discusses Marcuse's impact on academic philosophy in the following paragraph.

In my estimation, Marcuse’s efforts to deprovincialize U.S. culture have actually led to a recovery of philosophy in the post-60s United States academic context, especially among a new generation of scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are more conscious than ever of issues arising from conflicts involved in the context of our political, moral, and academic culture. After WW II, logical positivism had attained a near monopoly in U.S. graduate schools of philosophy and generally prevailed as the underlying scholarly methodology within the undergraduate curricula as well. European approaches such as phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, and critical theory tended to be severely marginalized, especially at the most prestigious private and the largest state universities. Although Marcuse died in 1979, for me it is impossible to believe that the philosophical upheavals which developed throughout the 1980s in the American Philosophical Association, for example, splitting “analysts” and “pluralists” were not substantially due to his influence. My personal supposition is that the APA’s own kind of Positivistenstreit could not have occurred apart from Herbert Marcuse’s immense impact in One-Dimensional Man. This was republished in 1991 with a new introduction by Douglas Kellner: further testimony to its ongoing pertinence to continuing controversies. See also Marcuse’s (1969b) APA address “The Relevance of Reality” which vividly demonstrates his radical and heretical stance vis à vis U.S. academic philosophy. Marcuse called for a rethinking of the relevance of reality in four key areas of philosophy: 1) linguistic analysis, emphasizing a new, more political linguistics; 2) aesthetics, emphasizing the nexus of artwork and society; 3) epistemology, moving towards a historical understanding of transcendent knowledge; and 4) the history of philosophy itself, emphasizing the internal relationships linking theory of knowledge (and hence theory of education) to the theory of government and the theory of politics since Plato: “authentic democracy presupposes equality in the ways, means, and time necessary for acquiring the highest level of knowledge” (Marcuse 1969b).

The 1969 referred to is Marcuse's Presidential Address to the Pacific APA: “The Relevance of Reality” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association. 1968-69.

On the founding of the department

2010-05-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

Richard Popkin wrote the following article for inclusion in: The Centennial Record of the University of California, 1868-1968. From it we can establish:

The exact date of the founding of the department (July 1, 1963)
The founding members: Richard Popkin, Jason Saunders, and Avrum Stroll
The next hired members: Paul Henry, Herbert Marcuse, and William Bartley
The beginnings of the graduate program in 1963-1964 (9 students); the fist Ph. D. candidacy (1965) and first graduate degree awarded (M.A. in June 1965)
The beginnings of the undergraduate program in 1963-1964
The early emphasis on history of philosophy and social-political philosophy

Philosophy: The Department of Philosophy was formed on July 1, 1963, with the appointment of Professors Richard H. Popkin (chairman), Jason L. Saunders, and Avrum Stroll. In 1964-66, Professors Paul Henry, Herbert Marcuse, Associate Professor William W. Bartley III, and some temporary members were added to the staff.
   Graduate instruction began in the academic year 1963-64 with nine graduate students. In 1964-65, there were 22 graduate students and in 1965-66, there will be more than 40. In January, 1965, the department received authorization for its M.A. and Ph.D. programs. In May, 1965, its first student was advanced to candidacy for the Ph.D. degree and in June, 1965, its first M.A. degree was awarded.
Undergraduate instruction began in 1964- 65, when the first freshman class was admitted. The department, in cooperation with the Department of Literature, offered the freshman humanities course to the entire freshman class (176 students). An elective introductory course was also offered to 16 freshmen in the spring of 1965. In 1965-66, the department will participate in both the freshman and sophomore humanities course in Revelle College, as well as offering elective philosophy courses at the sophomore and junior levels.
   The curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level is designed to emphasize the history of philosophy, political and social thought, and the widest possible variety of philosophical approaches. It is hoped thereby to provide students with a solid foundation and to encourage them to do independent, imaginative, mature, and self- critical work in philosophy.
   In its first two years, the department has also sponsored a public symposium on The Relevance of Philosophy Today, a campus-wide symposium on Marxism, a lecture series on Galileo (in conjunction with the Department of Literature), and a departmental col- loquium on Contemporary European Philosophy. The editorial office of the Journal of the History of Philosophy is in the department. The department has also initiated a cooperative graduate program with the Irvine campus.
-RICHARD H. POPKIN

Source: The Centennial Record of the University of California, 1868-1968. A Centennial Publication of the University of California. Compiled and Edited by Verne A. Stadtman and the Centennial Publications Staff. Link to HTML version at the University of California History Digital Archives:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~ucalhist/general_history/campuses/ucsd/departments_p.html#philosophy

Lowell Bergman, Herbert Marcuse, and Al Pacino

2010-04-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

Lowell A. Bergman is an American investigative reporter with The New York Times and a producer/correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline. Bergman is also the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught a seminar dedicated to investigative reporting for over 15 years. Bergman has received top honors in both print and broadcasting. In 2004, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with David Barstow.

(Source: Wikipedia, s.v. Lowell A. Bergman)

Professor Bergman was also a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he studied under Herbert Marcuse from 1966-1969.

See him portrayed by Al Pacino in the 1999 movie The Insider discussing studying philosophy at "UC La Jolla" (fast forward to 7:30 on this clip).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRKpxVXLBNQ

Doug Ireland, in an article posted to ZNET, transcribes an interview that journalist Danny Postel did with Lowell Bergman about Marcuse, in which he reflects on UCSD and La Jolla. I quote extensively from Ireland’s article below. After the quotation are links to Ireland’s article and to Lowell Bergman’s website.

Danny Postel did a long interview about Marcuse with the investigative journalist Lowell Bergman ... Lowell recounts his experiences with Marcuse, how they led to Bergman's career in journalism, and the influence Marcuse had on Bergman's work:

"I studied with Marcuse as a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) from 1966 to 1969," Bergman told Postel. " It was a Ph.D. program in the history of philosophy.....My first real contact with Marcuse came [when] reading his book Reason and Revolution, which remains one of the best, if not the best, expositions of Hegel in English. It wasâ€”maybe there are others nowâ€”the only coherent presentation of his philosophical insights in relation to the development of Marx's thought. That book led me to read some of his writings from his time in Frankfurt [Ger.], especially a seminal essay on liberalism...

"...One-Dimensional Man provided a unique way of looking at the rise of the authoritarian state in advanced industrial society. The suppleness of the analysis provided a way of thinking that ran counter to the dominant notion of 'progress' and 'Nature' that permeated thinking on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Marcuse began to articulate ideas about the way in which the culture and mass media were no longer presenting information except for the sake of presenting it. There was no depth, no history, no analysis. Information for information's sake without any attempt to help people understand....

"[My] jump to journalism was...in 1969, " Bergman (left) continues. "The spark was the incessant appearance of editorials in the San Diego Union-Tribune demanding that the University of California regents fire Marcuse. This came after students in Europe ran around in 1968 chanting "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" When Herbert went back to Germany that summer he was feted not just at universities but at outdoor rallies....Back in San Diego, the very conservative community reacted at first with virulent publicity and then physical harassment. Marcuse's telephone lines at home were cut. Someone drove by and fired at his garage door. There were phone threats. The tension was mounting. San Diego had an active right-wing vigilante movement, which I encountered later when I got into journalism. So his graduate students decided to start escorting him to school every morning, a 15-minute walk. This was in the time when UCSD was a small campus with a small undergraduate college and as many graduate students.

"This experience led the students to discuss the idea of putting out an alternative newspaper in what was and is a monopoly newspaper town. San Diego was not only the largest staging area for the Vietnam War; it was also home to a large military retirement community and politics that made parts of the deep South look liberal. Thus was born the San Diego Free Press, which a year later was renamed the San Diego Street Journal....The publicity [about Marcuse] in Europeâ€”and it was then repeated in the U.S. pressâ€”that [Marcuse] was an ideological leader came to the attention of the anticommunist ideologues associated with the Copley Press (the San Diego Union-Tribune). In those days the paper, now a conservative but civilized rag, was to the right of Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon called San Diego his 'favorite city.'...

"Marcuse was a symbol, which became even more threatening when one of his students, a veteran of the Hegel seminar and before that a student of Marcuse's at Brandeis, went to work at UCLA. That was Angela Davis (below left). The ensuing row brought in [then] governor Ronald Reagan and more action to terminate her appointment. Marcuse's own reputation, enhanced by hers, made him a central target of the anticommunists of the Reagan right in the late '60s. ... I guess what I'm getting at is that one doesn't normally associate political upheaval and mass mobilization with philosophy professorsâ€”at least not in the United States. Moreover, the figure of Marcuse doesn't exactly square with the style and tone of the '60s counterculture. There was something of a baroque quality about him: By that time he was fairly ancient, wore nice suits, spoke with a heavy German accent. There's a striking scene in the documentary film Herbert's Hippopotamus in which a group of student activists are holding a demonstration of some sort on the UCSD campus. They're running around, banging on drums, singingâ€”and then Marcuse steps up to speak, using language right out of 19th-century German philosophy. Yet he captivated them. They fell silent and listened to his every word. This struck me. What was it about himâ€”because I think he was fairly unique in this sense that so many young people revered and were inspired by?

"...Despite his Germanic professorial bearings and his old world roots, Marcuse was a captivating orator. His lectures on Hegel were phenomenal. The best way to describe them is to read Reason and Revolution. Few, if any, books on Hegelian philosophy and its aftermath are so cogent and to the point. In the world of UCSD at the time, Marcuse was an intellectual superstar. It was a little surreal, in the midst of San Diego county, high on a plateau, within sight of the largest military complex in the world....

"Marcuse's dialectical analysis did not depend on heavy-handed 'conspiracy' theories or mechanistic economic determinism. That would save me from falling into some of the simplistic traps that lure many people looking for tidy explanations...."

Doug Ireland's article can be found at these sites:
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/07/remembering_her.html
http://www.zcommunications.org/remembering-herbert-marcuse-by-doug-ireland

Lowell Bergman’s Berkeley website is here:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/bergman

UCSD philosophy undergraduates featured in the San Diego Reader

2010-04-30T12:45:00.000-07:00

Feature Article in the San Diego Reader about undergraduate philosophy majors at UCSD.
San Diego Reader | Philosophy Majors Sit Around and Think About Things

Portraits of Herbert Marcuse

2010-04-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

The UCSD library collections online have published a set of portraits of Herbert Marcuse taken while he was a professor in the philosophy department at UCSD.

MacArthur Fellowships

2010-04-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

Two members of the UCSD Philosophy Department have been awarded MacArthur Fellowships. How many other philosophy departments can boast of even one?

1993: Nancy Cartwright, Philosophy

1991: Patricia Churchland, Philosophy

More information on the award can be found here.

Date of founding of the department

2010-04-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

According to the "Historical Overview: San Diego" over at the University of California History digital archives, the department of philosophy at UCSD was established in 1963 just before the University was opened to undergraduates:

The campus had already branched into fields other than science and engineering with the establishment of Departments of Philosophy and Literature during 1963. In the fall of 1964, the campus opened for undergraduates offering a basic lower division curriculum preparing students for upper division majors in the humanities, the social sciences, the biological sciences, the physical sciences, and mathematics. A total of 181 freshmen enrolled in the pioneering undergraduate class.

One can put this in perspective relative to the establishment of the "University of California, San Diego" in 1960, which had previously been known as an "Institute of Technology and Engineering".

The first faculty appointment for the School of Science and Engineering was made in July, 1957, and was supported by a large grant of funds from the General Dynamics Corporation. By June 30, 1959, seven faculty appointments had been made and a total of 36 appointments had been approved for the 1959-60 fiscal year. The school enrolled its first graduate students in 1960 in the physical sciences.

From this beginning, the program was rapidly developed in the humanities and social sciences. By the mid-1960's, research ranged from the problems of cosmochemistry to studies of seventeenth-century philosophy. The teaching program reflected a broad spectrum of learning, with offerings in aerospace and mechanical engineering sciences, applied electrophysics, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, economics, history, languages, linguistics, literature, philosophy, physics, and psychology.

The Regents on November 18, 1960, selected the University of California, San Diego, as the name for the general campus in the La Jolla-San Diego area.

Stanley W. Moore Remembrance

2010-04-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

A remembrance of Stanley W. Moore (1914-1997), founding member of the Philosophy Department at UCSD, by his colleagues Richard J. Arneson, Frederick A. Olafson, Avrum Stroll, and Georgios H. Anagnostopoulos.

Stanley Moore, who taught at the UCSD Philosophy Department from 1965 until his retirement in 1974, died on December 5, 1997 in Santa Barbara at the age of 83. Stanley was a distinguished social and political philosopher, whose specialty was the work of Karl Marx. He was the author of numerous papers and four books--The Critique of Capitalist Democracy (1957), Three Tactics (1963), Marx and the Choice Between Socialism and Communism (1980), and Marx Versus Markets (1993).

The first of these works is more expository than critical. The latter three relentlessly explore a deceptively simple question: Why does Karl Marx call for the elimination not only of the inequalities he associated with capitalist private ownership but also the institution of market exchange? In other words, why does Marx envisage the ideal of humane and decent social order in the form of communist society? The issue goes to the core of Marx's intellectual legacy. Stanley Moore's writings analyze the issue with scrupulous scholarly care in the interpretation of Marx's text, a generous sympathy with the values of solidarity and emancipation he discerned in these texts, and a rigorous intelligence directed to the exposure of Marx's mistakes and evasions that have a bearing on his historical prophecies and revolutionary urgings. Moore's conclusion is that Marx has no good arguments that should persuade us to follow him beyond the condemnation of exploitation to the rejection of markets and exchange. For many years after his formal retirement, Moore continued his sensible and nuanced reflections as to how to extract the rational kernel of Marx's radicalism from the romantic and utopian shell in which it seemed to be encased. In his last writings he proposed a pairing of Rousseau's emphasis on economic transformation. All of Stanley Moore's writings felicitously combine the qualities of a rigorous scholar and staunch social critic.

During the nine years of his stay at UC San Diego Stanley was an invaluable colleague and a sane, steadying influence in the affairs of the Department of Philosophy. He was a man of excellent judgment, realistic, unsentimental, and concerned above all for academic and humanistic values. He was also that rare thing--a gentleman in the best sense of that much abused term--and as such he contributed to the broader education of his students as he did to their progress in philosophical studies. He was a very effective teacher at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels, blessed with an extraordinary memory for the literal wording of texts; and the directness and clarity of both his thought and his manner were great assets to him as a teacher. He was also a most congenial companion with a fine sense of humor and a strong allergy to cant of all varieties. Altogether, he combined the qualities of a scholar and a humane commentator on the life of his time in a wholly admirable way.

Stanley was a person of principle--fearless, and fair-minded. He became nationally famous in the profession because of his courageous stand against the encroachments of McCarthyism on academic freedom. In 1954 he lost his tenure position as Professor of Philosophy at Reed College when he refused to answer questions about his political affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In characteristically witty fashion Stanley remarked at the end of the hearings, "When this investigation started, I predicted that I would win the argument and lose the job. My prediction . . . has now been confirmed."

Stanley was right. He won the argument. In 1996, the Oregon Historical Quarterly published an 80-page article by Michael Munk entitled "Oregon Tests Academic Freedom in (Cold) Wartime: The Reed College Trustees versus Stanley Moore," that meticulously described the events that resulted in Moore's dismissal. In this essay, Munk reproduces a statement of "regret" by the Board of Trustees and the Reed administration, that was published in 1981. This statement formally revised the judgment of the 1954 trustees. In 1993, the president of Reed invited Stanley to visit the College, and in 1995 the last surviving member of the Board that fired Stanley expressed his regret and apologized to him.

As Munk reports, Moore waited 24 years to surprise both sides by telling the Oregonian in 1978 that he had been a member of the Communist party when he came to Reed but that he had left it before the HUAC hearings began. While still describing himself as a Marxist (albeit a "more critical one") he said he quit the party 18 months before the HUAC hearings because, "I couldn't stomach the American organization's kowtowing to Moscow on the so-called 'doctor's plot,' which had been announced in January 1953 and was declared a 'fabrication' shortly after Stalin's death just two months later."

Thus, had Moore been willing to accept the authority of his interrogators, he could have passed the trustees' political test. That is, he could have told them, truthfully, that he was not now a Communist. But as he stated at the time, he had decided not to do so in order to help Reed defend its historical attachment to academic freedom "against the fickle tides" of public opinion. As Michael Munk writes at the end of his essay, "Those who chose to play the historical moment of McCarthyism, and therefore dishonored Reed's proud distinction, still have Moore's challenging question echoing against their reputations: "If the careful deliberate judgment of the academic community is reversed in order to placate influential demagogues, who--more than forty years later--stands condemned?"

Having been fired under these conditions, Stanley was unable to find a permanent teaching post for another decade, even though he was widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable philosophical historians in America. He did teach during the period of 1955-1965 on a part-time basis at Barnard College. During this hiatus most of his time was spent researching and writing. In 1964, the new UCSD philosophy department, chaired by Richard Popkin and whose other members were Jason Saunders and Avrum Stroll, proposed a symposium on the topic "Marx Today." With financial support from Chancellor Herbert York and Dean Keith Brueckner, the department arranged for a three-day conference that was held in Sumner Auditorium. The main speakers were Stanley Moore, Herbert Marcuse, Lewis Feuer, and the moderator was Joseph Tussman of UC Berkeley. This conference caused a sensation on campus. It had virtually one hundred percent attendance from the scientific community. Its stars were Moore and Marcuse, and with the enthusiastic support of York and Brueckner, and such faculty members as S. J. Singer and James Arnold, we managed to hire both of them. It began an auspicious period that gave international visibility to the department. Those of us fortunate enough to have known Stanley will sorely miss him.

Source: University of California: In Memoriam, 1998 David Krogh, Editor. A publication of the Academic Senate, University of California, Available at:

http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb1p30039g&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text

Avrum Stroll

2010-04-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

Avrum received his Ph.D. from UC, Berkeley. He joined the Philosophy Department as a professor in 1963 and became chair in 1965 and 1968. His areas of specialization are philosophy of language, epistemology, history of 20th century analytic philosophy, and Wittgenstein studies. He is the author and co-author of twenty books and about 150 articles. Seven of the books were co-authored with Richard H. Popkin. Avrum's latest publications are "Searle on Knowledge, Certainty and Skepticism" in Searle's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement, "Philosophy in the Future" in Rescher Studies, and Much Ado About Non-Existence: Fiction and Reference (with A.P. Martinich, University of Texas at Austin). Publications in 2008 include "Richard Popkin and Philosophy Made Simple" in Essays in Honor of Richard Popkin, "Metaphysics Revived" in A Companion to Philosophy, and Moore's Paradox Revisited. Avrum has also written referee reports for Cambridge University Press and for Blackwell Pubishing. He has also written reviews for Mind and for the Internet Publications in Philosophy.

Avrum is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at UCSD.

Festschrift for Richard Popkin

2010-04-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

A book exploring the influence of the founder of the UCSD philosophy department, Richard Popkin.

Science Studies

2010-04-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

In this post, I have begun to collect some information about the founding of the Science Studies program.

Science Studies was founded in 1989 by four departments: communication, history, philosophy, and sociology.

Here is a link to an abstract of an article about the subject in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Essential Marcuse - UCSD-TV

2010-04-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

The following is a talk by UCSD Philosophy Ph.D. Andrew Feenberg in which he recollects studying under Marcuse at UCSD.

First Aired: 10/30/2007
59 minutes

Andrew Feenberg discusses his new collection of essays by Herbert Marcuse. The most influential radical philosopher of the 1960s, Marcuse's writings are noteworthy for their uncompromising opposition to both capitalism and communism.

The Essential Marcuse - UCSD-TV - University of California Television

Herbert's Hippopotomus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise

2010-04-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

Herbert Marcuse was hired by the philosophy department at UCSD in 1965. Here is a video documentary about his time at UCSD.

Herbert's Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise
56:49 - 3 years ago
This documentary examines the turbulent life in California of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), author of One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, among other books, professor of philosophy at the University of California San Diego, and a visionary and influential force for the student movement worldwide during the Sixties and Seventies. Blending archival footage, interviews, re- created scenes and voice-over narration, the video profiles not only the life of Marcuse but also the history of student protest and social activism. The video features interviews with Marcuse's student Angela Davis, former UCSD Chancellor William McGill, colleagues Fredric Jameson and Reinhard Lettau, and rare footage of Marcuse and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen

Journal of the History of Philosophy

2010-04-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

Journal of the History of Philosophy was established by Richard Popkin at UCSD in 1963. On the journal's website one finds the following historical information:

Founded in response to a motion passed by the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in December 1957 approving "the establishment of a journal devoted to the history of philosophy," the Journal of the History of Philosophy is an internationally recognized quarterly that publishes peer-reviewed articles, notes, discussions, and book reviews devoted to the history of Western philosophy, broadly conceived. Now in its forty-seventh year, the Journal is published by The Johns Hopkins University Press and is available online at Project Muse.

"The Journal of the History of Philosophy is the oldest journal devoted to scholarship in English on all periods of the history of philosophy. It has been the venue for many seminal articles over the years, and its articles and extensive reviews remain indispensible reading for every student of the history of philosophy."

Paul Guyer, University of Pennsylvania

"The Journal of the History of Philosophy has established itself as the leading American journal in the field; it is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in the history of philosophy."

Nicholas Jolley, University of California, Irvine