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

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)

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

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.

Major Publications by UCSD Philosophers 1963-1969

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).

Paul Henry (1906-1984)

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

Richard Popkin, Founder of the UCSD Philosophy Department

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

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).

Chairs

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

Richard Popkin's recollections of hiring Marcuse at UCSD

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.

On the founding of the department

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

Festschrift for Richard Popkin

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

Journal of the History of Philosophy

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