UCSD Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Frederick Olafson has died. The following is a message from his son:
I'm sorry to report that Frederick Olafson has died. He passed away quietly at about 7:30 on Tuesday evening at a San Diego Hospice unit in Carlsbad. He was 87.
A distinguished scholar and author, Professor Olafson taught at Vassar, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and Harvard before joining UCSD's philosophy department in 1971. He remained there until his retirement in 1991 -- including a period as department chairman in the '70s -- and returned in the mid '90s to lead seminars.
His numerous books include 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), What Is a Human Being? A Heideggerian View (1995) and Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against Scientism (2001).
Professor Olafson is survived by his three sons. His ashes will be scattered by his children in a private ceremony. A memorial service is planned for the fall.
Links to some of Professor Olafson's many papers are available through philpapers.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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:
