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.

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).

San Diego Historical Society Photo of Marcuse

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)

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)

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

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

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).

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

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”

A Few More Pieces of the Marcuse Puzzle

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