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

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 1: the 1960s

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.

Volume 5 of Herbert Marcuse's Collected Papers

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.

Alternatives: Summer 1966

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

Alternatives: The New Magazine of Politics and Society

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

The Essential Marcuse - UCSD-TV

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