Enhancing Cultural Intefrlow

Between East and West

Introduction

In the spring of 1925 I graduated from Swenson, Texas High School as valedictorian of a class of only five members, and in September of that year, shortly before my seventeenth birthday, my father took me and my trunk in the family car to Austin, state capital and site of the University of Texas, which then had an enrollment of about 5,000. From that time until the spring of 1931 I went to school regular sessions and summers as well, going home only for holidays. When I entered the University, I selected the Pre Law Program, but by the time I completed its requirements I had decided to work toward writing a great American novel; and in those days before the time of creative writing programs I mistakenly assumed that the best way to move toward this goal was to major in English. But my term papers for this field strengthened my scholarship rather than my drive for creative writing. As an English major, however, I took both a BA with Phi Beta Kappa honors and an MA in 1929 and, for that matter, went on to complete most of the course requirements for a Ph.D. The English Department was strong, and the University had excellent libraries. I especially enjoyed Clark Slover’s year graduate course in Comparative Literature. My MA thesis was on Emerson as a Lecturer, and I pursued the relationship between Emerson and Whitman for my doctoral studies in English. My doctoral advisor (Killis Campbell) suggested that more work in philosophy might help me clarify various problems with them. Accordingly, I spent 1929-30 doing more work in philosophy along with English and was fortunate to receive for 1930-31 an Oldright Fellowship to continue this study, thus joining T.V. Smith and Charner Perry, among others, as holders of this award.

Fairly early in my fellowship year, however, I became convinced that shifting to Philosophy was the way to go, but at that time the University did not yet offer the doctorate in the field. Stanford University Professor Harold Chapman Brown, collaborator with Dewey, Mead, and others on Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (1917) and then visiting professor at the University, however, recommended that I pursue this goal at the University of California at Berkeley, which I did.

During my time at the University of Texas there were several members of the Philosophy Department and various visitors with pragmatic connections, but it was a pluralistic department, and from time to time several members of the Department participated in a lively departmental seminar. Senior member and Harvard graduate A. P. Brogan, who specialized in Logic, Value Theory, and Greek Philosophy, developed a melioristic theory of value with ‘better than’ rather than ‘good’ as the focal concept, and E. T. Mitchell shared this view. It had parallels with Dewey but arguably had some advantages in statement. Charner M. Perry, later Chair of the Chicago Department, Donald A. Piatt, and Charles W. Morris, visiting professor for a summer term, all had doctorates from the University of Chicago. Perry taught an interesting course on American Philosophy and in more than one seminar saw to it that I strengthened my background in figures like A. H. Bradley, a leading Absolute Idealist. I was a graduate assistant or reader for Piatt in his popular ethics course, in which the Dewey and Tufts Ethics (1908) was the text and Bertrand Russell’s just out Marriage and Morals (1929) was required reading. At the time I went to Berkeley as a graduate student he left Texas for a position (later as Chair) at UCLA, where he was still teaching in 1964-65 when George Sun studied with him before coming, at his recommendation, to SIUC. Piatt was an eloquent spokesman for pragmatism, and Dewey, in his response to critics in Schilpp’s first volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of John Dewey (1939), praised Piatt’s contribution to it. Piatt also is numbered among the pragmatists who have developed some appreciation of Eastern Thought.[1]

Robert E. Fitch, who later took his doctorate from Columbia University, came to the Department for a few years fresh with what was happening at Columbia a year or so before I left. We also had various outstanding professors as visitors for summer sessions. For example, I remember Rice Professor Radoslav A. Tsanoff giving public lectures on the nature of evil; and in 1930 I sat in on an exciting summer course on Theory of Mind by Charles W. Morris, then at Rice, while he was working on his Six Theories of Mind (1932) and had extensive discussions with him.

Berkeley in the 1930s opened up for me an exciting new world. Something always seemed to be happening there both in philosophy and in society. Live Communists were debating with capitalists, and lines were drawn more sharply politically. Even Socialists appeared dangerous to university officials, who refused permission for Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist candidate for President, to speak on campus in spite of the pleas of graduate students in philosophy, among others. Harry Bridges and his longshoremen were leading strikes which shut down nearly everything for a time. The Great Depression and New Deal Agencies for coping with it were very much in evidence in California as in the rest of the country, but people fleeing from the Dust Bowl, which included portions of my native Texas, helped exacerbate California problems. In the Dust Bowl farmers with crop failures found themselves with mortgages far higher than the current value of the land and eventually quit making payments, and their banks failed. Some of these farmers along with sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant workers swelled the ranks of Okies who headed for the promised land of California. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath affords a vivid portrayal of the plight of these people in California, especially those who worked in the grape vineyards. During my student years there I remember visiting "Pipe City" in Alameda on San Francisco Bay, where the migrant workers had put together huge unused sewer pipes for shelter and set up a self-governing body to manage their village, look for jobs, and distribute any group income.

At the end of my first school year in Berkeley, in June 1932, I married Elizabeth Herring, daughter of Judge Herring, a Texas lawyer, and his wife. She combined sitting in on some classes with work, and this broadened our observations. For example, she worked for the Federal Land Bank in Oakland as a legal secretary and for a time for the new California State Emergency Relief Administration. On one of our summer visits back home we helped my father who was in charge of setting up one of the New Deal agricultural programs for local farmers, one calling for plowing up every third or fourth row of cotton or feed for cattle in return for a government grant. We were reminded, of course, of huge piles of California oranges doused with kerosene and set afire by the owners because the price was so low.

The Berkeley Philosophy Department was not large by present standards but was a pioneer in teaching large numbers of students through a combination of lectures two days a week by one of the professors to 300 or so students and a third day of discussion conducted by teaching fellows or assistants for groups of 25 or so. My first two years I assisted Stephen C. Pepper in large problems in philosophy course and assisted William R. Dennes and Donald S. Mackay in a smaller history of philosophy course for the third year allowed on assistantships there. For my remaining two years in residence I earned some money tutoring students needing help in philosophy, especially in the large introductory lecture courses taught by G. P. Adams, J. Loewenberg, Pepper, and others. I conducted special sessions for groups of football players, and luckily, according to the Athletic Department, each of them at least passed and some even made B or A. I also tutored some students in more advanced courses like Pepper’s year course in Aesthetics.

As I later learned from fellow teaching assistants, I signed up for more courses my first year than they thought reasonable, but my advisor, Professor Adams, saw no reason why I could not take them if I wished. At any rate, my program for that year suggested the rich variety of subjects and professors available, and it was a full program. I signed up for year seminars with Loewenberg, Pepper, and University of Vienna Visiting Professor Moritz Schlick, a one-semester seminar on Ethics with Adams and a course on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with Loewenberg, and audited Schlick’s Theory of Knowledge and Philosophy of Science. Loewenberg’s seminar was on the History of Philosophy and as usual the special topic was Hegel’s Phenomenology. He had studied with and assisted Josiah Royce at Harvard and was one of the great interpreters of Hegel. Pepper’s seminar was on Aesthetics, but it might equally well have been called Metaphysics. One of his main ideas was that sound aesthetic criticism is based on criteria derived from relatively adequate world hypotheses, and another of his original ideas was his conception of a root metaphor as a source of the categories for a world view. He confessed that he had come out of Harvard as a dogmatic mechanistic naturalist but had come to believe that his analytic mechanism was only one of some four or five relatively adequate world views. Schlick’s seminar was on Logic, but the entire year was devoted to a rather slender volume, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, then relatively new. Schlick as founder of the Vienna Circle and a leading logical positivist had equally interesting things to say in his other two courses. Because of an infected wisdom tooth during the semester he offered the Philosophy of Science, Victor Lenzen of the Physics Department had to fill in for him for a couple of weeks or so on relativity theory. In spite of his affiliation with the Physics Department, Lenzen took his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, and the Philosophy Department there had delegated him to confer with C. S. Peirce’s widow about her husband’s papers. Incidentally, he was a member of my doctoral dissertation committee and later a contributor to Schilpp’s LLP volume on Albert Einstein. The last time I saw him, at a Philosophy meeting, he told me about his discovery of a previously unknown paper by Peirce. Professor Adams had an interesting blend of Plato, Dewey, and Adams in his seminar on Ethics.

Later I studied Theory of Knowledge with Paul Marhenke, a very able analyst who was chair of my dissertation committee although the final chapter of my doctoral essay on H. H. Price was closer to the things on which I had worked with him than the main body of my dissertation, which was closer to Pepper. Marhenke and Arthur E. Murphy, both with California doctorates, were leading Objective Relativists. I had a course on Hume with visiting appointee Ralph W. Church, a Malebranche scholar. Among the other visiting professors were H. C. Brown, whom I had met in Texas, and William Savery from the University of Washington, whom Dewey praised in response to his critics in The Philosophy of John Dewey (1939) for his helpful comments on pluralism, continuity, and contingency as well as for placing his (Dewey’s) views in historic perspective by relating them to Peirce and James. I sat in on a course in Metaphysics and/or American Philosophy with him. I also audited an interesting course on Philosophical Ideas in Literature jointly taught by Loewenberg and Edward W. Strong, both members of my dissertation committee, and I sat in on a Psychology course taught by Edward C. Tolman, author of Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, and attended occasional Psychology lectures by visitors. For that matter, the Philosophy Department had an annual series of lectures on a topic selected in advance, and each member of the Department as well as Professor Lenzen spoke on it. I first met Professor Schilpp at one of these lectures which he and some of his College of the Pacific students attended. Incidentally, Willis Moore, later a colleague at the University of Missouri and SIUC, and Cecil H. Miller, another colleague at the University of Missouri and lifetime friend, were fellow graduate students at Berkeley.

In Berkeley there was a rich array of interesting art exhibits, concerts, visiting speakers, and so on, and San Francisco in those days was a ferryboat ride away from the East Bay with an even richer choice of symphonies, operas, plays, burlesque, and cable cars, with bells clanging, running up and down high hills which may have looked even steeper to someone from the plains of West Texas. I remember that one summer the Coolidge String Quartet presented at the University a series on Beethoven and Schönberg. At the beginning I sat through Schönberg to get to Beethoven, but by the latter part of the series I began to find Schönberg interesting.

Sometime during my time in Berkeley the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, which, incidentally, G. P. Adams had a major hand in helping organize in 1924, met at Mills College in Oakland in the days before these meetings outgrew college campuses, and many of us graduate students attended our first APA meeting there. I was especially impressed by Professor John Elof Boodin, who sat on a comfortable couch with his eyes closed giving the impression of being asleep, but when the Chair asked: "And what do you think of this argument, Professor Boodin?" he gave an impressive analysis of it. I also remember a series of talks another time in Berkeley between the UCLA and Berkeley Philosophy Departments when they were trying to work out agreements on policy for the University as a whole, and they had one joint session or social affair open to the graduate students who cared to attend, and it was good to see Professors Piatt and Donald Williams, among others, at it.

From 1936 to 1949 I taught at the University of Missouri at Columbia except for one term in 1947 as a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton. I went to the University of Missouri as third person in a department which already had Jay William Hudson, Chair, and Willis Moore, who had come from Berkeley in 1935; and I was assigned an old, dilapidated, oak roll-top desk, which Professor Hudson assured me had been the desk of such illustrious departmental predecessors as Frank Thilly, A. 0. Lovejoy, A.K. Rogers, George H. Sabine, and Glenn R. Morrow. Hudson made a fitting addition to this number. Thilly went from Missouri to Princeton. So we share two institutions, and Lovejoy and I share three: California, Washington University, and the University of Missouri, but I was first at Missouri and then at Washington University, whereas he spent seven years at the latter before going to Missouri for two years. Before taking his Ph.D. from Harvard, Hudson studied with George H. Howison, who started Berkeley on the way to greatness in philosophy.

My time at Missouri was one of growth for the Department, whose members tripled with the addition of such people as C. A. Berndtson, W. D. Oliver, Cecil Miller, Robert Rein’l, S. M. Eames, Elizabeth Ramsden (later Eames), A. C. Benjamin (Chair,1945-66), and J. H. Melzer. Most of my early teaching, appropriately enough for a beginner, was in introductory courses, but I was given two upper division courses, and the Department wanted one to be Philosophy of Science, which I taught until Benjamin came in 1945. Hudson, Department Chair, was teaching Aesthetics, another of my favorites, but he suggested that I might do one on Philosophical Ideas in Literature, which I greatly enjoyed the rest of my teaching career. World War II created problems, of course. Some served in the military, and others as civilians taught classes for military programs on campus in such fields as Geography, Mathematics, and Psychology. For example, I taught Mathematics to Army Air Force students in uniform and also Psychology in the Army Specialized Training Program for Premeds as well as for general students. The University reorganized its General Education Program after the War, and the Faculty approved a Remedial Logic Requirement, which kept us busy. I chaired a committee to develop a new general education program for the Humanities and Arts and learned a great deal from sitting in on classes taught by colleagues in Music, Art, and the like. Our Department got a great many students from the University’s Walter Williams School of Journalism. Professor Hudson, for example, taught a very popular American Ideals course, forms of which were later taught by Willis Moore, Morris Eames, and myself. Willis Moore left for the University of Tennessee in 1947, and in that year I taught a semester as visiting lecturer at Princeton, and in a seminar on American Pragmatism had such bright young graduate students as John Rawls, Willis Doney, David Sachs, and Paul W. Taylor, who later were faculty members, respectively, at Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Brooklyn College.

For my last years at Missouri I had been working with John Dewey, Ray Lepley, Stephen Pepper, Charles Morris, E. T. Mitchell, Dewitt Parker, Henry Aiken, Clarence Ayres, A. C. Garnett, George Geiger, Bertram Jessup, H. N. Lee, and Philip Rice on Value: A Cooperative Inquiry, edited by Lepley, setting forth our individual views and criticizing and responding to our colleagues; but the book came out after I had gone to Washington University.

From 1949 to 1963 I was at Washington University in St. Louis, and it was an intensive period for philosophy, educational administration, and professional service on both the local and national levels. One special event colored everything that happened during this period and on into my early years at SIUC. That was Sputnik 1. On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, and this sent a shock through our defense operations and our educational system. It seemed clear that we were behind in mathematics and the sciences, and in the ensuing discussion it was apparent that other fields also needed strengthening. Accordingly, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act Fellowship Program which provided fellowships pretty well across the board for Ph.D. candidates for up to three years along with supporting funds for the graduate schools and departments involved. At any rate, I went to St. Louis as Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department, succeeding Charles E. Cory, when Arthur H. Compton was Chancellor of the University and Stuart A. Queen, sociologist, was Dean of Arts and Sciences. His successor as Dean was Thomas S. Hall, a biologist, who translated a volume of Descartes’ writings on biology. We aimed at a pluralistic department and over the period expanded courses and faculty to handle a Ph. D. program. Although I had noted some special interests, as a group they were scholars of very broad humanitistic interests. Huston Smith, born in China of missionary parents, had joined the Department in 1947, after studying with Henry N. Wieman at Chicago and Stephen Pepper at Berkeley, and while at Washington University he authored The Purposes of Higher Education (1953), prepared in connection with a reorganization of the Arts and Science program, and The Religions of Man (1958). Lawson P. Chambers (Harvard Ph.D.), who was born in Turkey with a missionary background and had taught extensively abroad, was near retirement. Omar Khayyam Moore, exceptionally adept at teaching symbolic logic to both beginners and graduates and sometimes using the same advanced text for both, and Richard S. Rudner (Pennsylvania), later to earn distinction in Philosophy of Science and rejoin the Department, were with us only two or three years. Other members of the Department early in my term were Leo Litwak (Columbia), philosopher of science turned novelist, S. Morris Eames (Chicago), known later for his Pragmatic Naturalism, Elizabeth R. Eames (Bryn Mawr), whose doctoral dissertation was on Russell and Dewey and who has since authored Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge among other distinguished works on him, and Albert William Levi (Chicago), who in 1960 received the first Phi Beta Kappa Award in History, Philosophy, and Religion for his Philosophy and the Modern World. In connection with Morris Eames I should add that the University received a grant for teaching a group of European laborers about things American, and he did an exceptionally fine job of teaching them American Ideals.

Among the other regular staff members I appointed were Phillip D. Cummins (Iowa), seventeenth and eighteenth century English and French Philosophy, James W. Dye (Tulane), history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and culture, William Forthman, who did a dissertation on mysticism at UCLA, Donald S. Lee (Yale), philosophy of science, Allen 0. Miller (Yale), philosophy of religion, James A. Snedden, history of philosophy, Herbert Spiegelberg (Munich), phenomenology, A. J. Stenner (Michigan State), philosophy of science and Wittgenstein, and Richard Wisan (Columbia), ordinary language analysis. In addition we had as visitors for longer or shorter terms such people as Constant C. C. Chang, Taoist scholar (Fulbright for a year), Geoffrey Clive (Harvard), nineteenth century thought, existentialism, and philosophical anthropology, El Ehwany (Fulbright), Egyptian Muslim, Gerald Heard, philosophy of literature and religion, Cecil H. Miller (California), philosophy of philosophy and logic, Sohaku Ogata (Fulbright), Japanese Zen Buddhist, D. B. Richardson, philosophy of culture and history of philosophy, Henry N. Wieman, philosophy of creativity and philosophy of religion, Elmer J. Arndt, ethics and history of philosophy, Dr. Samuel Rosenkranz, University College, and Zora Lasch, Continuing Education courses. Before coming to St. Louis with her husband Robert Lasch, editor-in-chief of the Post-Dispatch, she was Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska. Both she and Elizabeth R. Eames had spent some time at Bertrand Russell’s Experimental School, and they were two of our featured speakers for some kind of celebration for Russell. Chancellor Compton was affiliated with the Department as Visitor in 1957 and as Lecturer in 1962. He planned a General Studies course for Seniors, for which he invited me to do one section.

In 1953 to my other assignments were added further responsibilities as Associate Dean of the Graduate School, and in 1954 I was named Dean of the Graduate School, continuing in this capacity until June 1963. For the summer of 1954 I also served as Acting Dean of Faculties. During this time we were working intensively on reorganizing our general studies program, with committee sessions sometimes two or three times a week. Then came Sputnik I in October 1957 to make educational reexamination a national affair for twelve or fifteen years.

In any event, for this period I held a number of offices with the American Philosophical Association: for example, Secretary-Treasurer, Western Division, 1949-51; Secretary-Treasurer of the National Board of Officers, 1960-66; Committee to Promote Original Work in Philosophy, 1954-60, and the administration of a fellowship program for philosophers; Chair, Placement Service; member, Committee on Graduate School and the Training of Professional Philosophers, 1954-60; and Co-Chair with Wayne Leys, who was then still at Roosevelt University, Special Planning Committee for XIIIth World Congress of Philosophy in Mexico City in 1963. I was also President of the Southwestern Philosophical Society, 1955; President, Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 1958-59; Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1958-; Chair, Western Conference on the Teaching of Philosophy, 1958-60; Chair, Conference of Secretaries of Constituent Societies of American Council of Learned Societies, 1962-66; and Secretary-Treasurer, Association of Graduate Schools of the American Association of Universities, 1962-1963, attending my final meeting some months after going to SIUC.

I was also active both nationally and internationally in various philosophical and graduate school enterprises, serving, for example, on an Association of Graduate Schools--American Council of Learned Societies--U.S. State Department Committee concerned with exchange of graduate students and scholars between this country and the U.S.S.R. and other "Iron Curtain" countries. I served on various committees of the Association of Graduate Schools in the American Association of Universities: for example, Chair, Committee on Administrative Problems, 1958-59. I also held various offices in the Midwest Conference on Graduate Study and Research; and I was one of’ those who helped set up the new Council of Graduate Schools in the United States when it became clear that a more comprehensive organization than the AGS would be needed to help implement the new National Defense Education Act programs. Accompanied by Elizabeth and daughters Helen and Mary Louise, I participated in the 1959 East-West Philosophy Conference in Hawaii as well as in various subsequent ones. Incidentally, Gray L. Dorsey of the Washington University Law School also participated as did Professor T’ang Chün-I of New Asia College, Hong Kong. I saw Vice President of India and Chancellor of Delhi University Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in the 1959 conference and conveyed his greetings to Chancellor Compton. Radhakrishnan had spent about a week with us at Washington University and delivered a lecture on comparative religion to a crowded audience in Graham Chapel before the days of air conditioning there. I chaired the session.

I officially headed an impressive U.S. Delegation to the Second Extraordinary Inter-American Convention of Philosophers in San Jose, Costa Rica, in July 1961, and, once more, my wife Elizabeth and daughters Helen and Mary Louise accompanied us. Our delegation included such people as Robert Brumbaugh, Hector-Neri Castañeda, Peter Caws, Walter Cerf, George Clark, O. A. Fránquiz, Lucius Garvin, Father Robert J. Henle of St. Louis University, Charles Hartshorne, then of Emory University, W. J. Kilgore of Baylor University, C. A. Kubitz of Illinois, Quinton Lyon, William D. Nietmann, and Patrick Romanell then of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

Charles and Dorothy Hartshorne had come to Costa Rica about a week early after a birding tour in Panama to visit Alexander F. Skutch, ornithologist, distinguished botanist, and philosopher, and study bird songs first in the rain forest and later in a mountain range almost 10,000 feet high where high-altitude birds might be heard. Skutch gives an interesting account of the week and Hartshorne’s method of studying bird song in my LLP volume some thirty years later on The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne (1991) in his essay on "Bird Song and Philosophy" and Hartshorne responds. I also remember walking through the gardens in San José between sessions with Hartshorne and getting a combination of comments on bird song, the flowers, and Anselm’s second proof of his ontological argument. Skutch also did a paper for the convention. The President of the Congress, Professor Abelardo Bonilla was also Vice President of Costa Rica, and the President arranged to have Bonilla as the Acting President of the country for the week of the convention to realize at least briefly Plato’s ideal that philosophers should be rulers. Both the city and the country treated us royally, and the newspapers made us headline news. Of all the countries represented in this conference only Costa Rica could validly claim to spend more on education than on support of the military. Many distinguished philosophers from other countries were in attendance: for example, Francisco Miró Quesada, Lima, Peru, who later contributed to my LLP volume on A. J. Ayer and who is now Chairman of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.

To the list of activities related to philosophical and graduate school enterprises in the late Washington University and early SIU periods might be added my serving as a consultant for various foundations and government agencies: for example, for some years I was Chair of a regional committee (three to five states) of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Program, and before coming to SIUC I began work as a consultant for the U.S. Office of Education, helping draw up guidelines for the National Defense Education Act program and screening proposals from universities in connection with it. On the local scene Washington University participated for a few weeks in an interesting Colorado Danforth Conference on Aims of Liberal Education, and since our Dean of Arts and Sciences was otherwise tied up with pressing matters, I was administrative head of our delegation.

In some ways it was difficult to leave St. Louis and Washington University, for they had a tremendous amount going for them, and after fourteen years we had many friends and ties there; but SIU offered the prospect of less administrative work and more time to do philosophy. St. Louis is conveniently located for short visits by travelers with other final destinations, some of them long enough to show them the attractions of Forest Park: the art museum, the Botanical Gardens, the Jewel Box, the zoo, the astronomical observatory, and so on. For example, former U.S. Senator from Illinois T. V. Smith would call from Union Station to say he had so many hours before departure, and this was good for an interesting few hours on philosophy, politics, poetry, or whatever he had been doing lately. My wife was active in Democratic politics and a painting group with Mildred Bailey Carpenter with Washington University painter-professor Fred Green Carpenter sometimes drawn in, and we had a regular round of Artists Guild meetings, art exhibits, symphony concerts, and such other interesting events to attend as a Cardinal baseball game. University City schools were good, but Helen was already in the University of Missouri-Columbia before we left. Mary Louise was a junior looking forward to her senior year there. I was involved in such local matters as the University City Charter Association, of which I was President 1962-63. I attended an informal Metropolitan St. Louis current issues discussion group called the Dunkers, which was spearheaded by elderly but lively Frank O’Hare, friend of Eugene V. Debs, frequent presidential candidate of the Socialist Party between 1900 and 1920. Average attendance was 15 to 25 but occasionally quite large with a diverse mixture of civic leaders like the Mayor and other city officials, congressmen, business leaders, labor leaders, educators, newspaper editors like Irving Dilliard and Robert Lasch of the Post-Dispatch, an occasional artist, or anyone who was doing something interesting affecting St. Louis. Saint Louis University and Washington University, of course, always had something interesting going on, and from time to time there was a big event like a scientific conference with a number of big names in physics such as Werner K. Heisenberg of indeterminacy fame.

Washington University was host and I was chair of local arrangements for a meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in St. Louis, April 30, May 1 and 2, 1953. This meeting was the first convention for St. Louis in which the APA policy of racial non-discrimination in housing was practiced, and by the late 1950s this non-discriminatory policy had been followed there with other professional societies as well.

Southern Illinois University has been my academic home since 1963 except for three semesters as distinguished visiting professor at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, between Fall 1977 and Spring 1980. When my friend Willis Moore, Chair of the SIUC Philosophy Department, told me they were building a department with unique possibilities for helping better the cause of philosophy in this country and that he and his colleagues were convinced that my joining them would improve their chances for success, I accepted the challenge. President Delyte W. Morris, himself a native of Southern Illinois, wanted for Southern Illinois youngsters the best education of which they were capable, and he was effective in getting Illinois legislators to share his vision. He was responsible for many helpful innovations. For example, he pushed special education, and he was providing improved access for physically handicapped students before this was mandated nationally. He set up international education programs and encouraged departments to recruit foreign students; and he did wonders to help preserve trees and campus beauty while constructing the new buildings needed for growing numbers of students. He also appointed a number of distinguished scholars who had retired elsewhere. These included George E. Axtelle, John L. Childs, and George S. Counts, all of whom strengthened our resources for the Dewey Project. Another was Harlow Shapley, distinguished astronomer, who taught Astronomy here. Since there was no department of astronomy, he was offered a choice of departments between Physics and Philosophy for his office, and to our delight he chose Philosophy, which gave us the pleasure of his inexhaustible store of good stories such as one about bringing some ants back from the Kremlin under his watch crystal.

My first interview with President Morris was divided into two parts, the first just before a meeting of the Board of Trustees and a longer one of two or three hours after he got out of the Board meeting. Among other things, he mentioned a recently launched John Dewey Cooperative Research Project which he hoped I would want to be a part of, and he made personal commitments for funds needed if the planned publication of Dewey’s collected works was to proceed. In point of fact I did join the group and a little later became Chair of the Editorial Advisory Board and wrote introductions for the first volume of the Early Works and a couple of the Middle Works. The Board for the Early Works was made up of George E. Axtelle, who in initiating the project first had in mind an analytic concordance of Dewey’s major terms, Jo Ann Boydston, Textual Editor and later also General Editor, Joe R. Burnett (University of Illinois), S. Morris Eames, Wayne A. R. Leys, William R, McKenzie (Education & Philosophy), Francis F. Villemain (Edwardsville), and myself, and Willis Moore was Chair of the Advisory Committee. We also published a Guide to the Works of John Dewey (1970), edited by Jo Ann Boydston. My essay for it was "Dewey’s Philosophy and Philosophic Method." The Dewey Project served as a model for definitive, critical, or authentic editions of the collected works of Peirce, James, and Santayana, and our edition of the Dewey volumes is the first non-literary work to carry the Seal of the Modern Language Association of America Center for Editions of American Authors.

The Philosophy Department when I came as Research Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy was chaired by Willis Moore, whom as Chair of the APA Placement Committee I had recommended some years earlier to Vice President and Acting Chair of the Department Charles Tenney. Both an able leader and a fine colleague, Moore was especially known for his activities in helping develop the SIUC Department. At the time there was a shortage of philosophy teachers, and National Defense Education Act Fellowships were available for doctoral students. So the time was ripe for development, and he wanted my help in developing the doctoral program. Under his leadership the department became one of the top twenty or twenty-five departments in the country. At the time of his retirement in 1973 demand for philosophers was down, but he proudly noted that three of the professors who joined the department under his chairmanship were listed in Who’s Who in the World and almost half the members of his department, including himself, were listed either in Who’s Who in America or the international volume, thus giving it at the time a listing not exceeded by any department in the country. In developing the department, moreover, he was concerned to provide not merely training for those who wished to major in the subject at both the undergraduate and at the graduate level but also courses for the general student who would never take more than one or two courses in the subject. Nor were his contributions to the University limited to the Philosophy Department. He served on numerous key university committees, and through these activities became known for his educational vision both at home and throughout the nation. His work as Chair of the SIU Committee on Freedom and Dissent served as a national model. He served as faculty advisor for the State Board of Higher Education and a term as member of the University Board of Trustees.

Among the other members of the Department in 1963 were George E. Axtelle (California), Luis A. Baralt, distinguished Cuban refugee, James A. Diefenbeck (Harvard), William H. Harris (Boston), George T. McClure (Ohio State), G. K. Plochmann (Chicago), William J. McKeefery, Dean of Academic Affairs, Charles D. Tenney (Oregon), who divided one course a year between English and Philosophy, and H. N. Wieman (Harvard). They constituted an able, innovative, and diverse nucleus for a pluralistic department. I have commented on Axtelle and the Dewey Project earlier. He also offered seminars on Dewey, James, Peirce, Mead, and the Pragmatic Movement. Baralt was in some ways a Bergsonian who contributed both to our SIU Latin American program and our offerings in history of philosophy. In working out his own ideas on philosophy, history, history of philosophy, and aesthetics Diefenbeck was influenced by Collingwood. Harris was largely responsible for our Asiatic Studies Program and our course on Eastern Religions. Holder of two Fulbrights to India and other countries of Southeast Asia, President Morris gave him a substantial allowance for purchase of books and other research material while in India, and the Morris Library is the better for it. Harris was an excellent ambassador of American culture and academic character at their best. Of one of his articles published in an Indian journal in 1957 Professor N. A. Nikam, distinguished Indian philosopher and holder of top offices in the main Indian philosophical association, declared: "This one instance alone should justify the program of the Fulbright Foundation and what it is doing or has done for the understanding of our two cultures." Dr. Nikam held a visiting appointment in our department in the late 1960s, and at least one of his daughters took a degree in Home Economics here. Incidentally, Professor Leys and I conducted a seminar on Eastern Mysticism for Bill while he was ill in 1964 or 1965. We first thought that we were to do it only for the first week or two, but we had it for the entire term with several very knowledgeable Indian graduate students in it. It was quite a learning experience for the two of us. As a further afterthought, thanks mainly to Dr. P. Krishna Mohan who did his dissertation under Leys on Gandhi, Memorial Lectureships have been set up at the International Center for Nonviolence and Peace in Madras and Hyderabad in memory of Professors Harris, Leys, Moore, Hahn, and Schilpp.

Shu-hsien Liu was Graduate Assistant for Harris, and during the latter’s illness he conducted the General Studies course on Eastern Philosophies and Religions; and after taking his Ph.D. here under Wieman, shortly after Harris’s death he was appointed to take the latter’s place. He moved from Assistant Professor to Full Professor and left us in 1981 to become Chair Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong after a few years of visiting appointments. He was Associate Professor at Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan when he came here for graduate study. His research interests are in Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy and Religion, and Philosophy of Culture. He is a leading expert on Neo-Confucianism. He did an interesting paper on "Henry Nelson Wieman and Chinese Philosophy" for the 1984 Wieman Centennial Conference held at SIUC, August 16-19 (American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Vol.12, No. 1, Jan.1991, pp. 49-61).

McClure received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for his research. He admired Whitehead and Polanyi and had strong contextualistic emphases. Ploch-mann, Guggenheim Fellow in 1960, had detailed insights and synoptic grasp of a wide range of topics from Wittgenstein to metaphysics, history of philosophy, and history of medicine and allied arts. In some ways he reminds me of Richard McKeon. He is Editor of the SIU Press Series, Philosophical Explorations. McKeefery contributed much to helping make our classrooms better for teaching and learning, Tenney, an able and creative philosopher and administrator, who brought something of a Whiteheadian slant to his teaching, authored one of the best works on creativity, The Discovery of Discovery (1991). Wieman, as I have noted elsewhere, was a prophet, philosopher, theologian, and concerned person with a fresh contextualistic vision of God as creative enterprise, a strong sense of urgency, and zeal for making his vision operative in a changing world. He was subject of the fourth volume of the Library of Living Theology, The Empirical Theology of Henry Nelson Wieman, edited by Robert W. Bretall. In his time here we were on a quarter system, and he insisted on a fresh topic each quarter for his seminar until at the urgent request of the students he repeated one on his own views.

Professors Morris and Elizabeth Eames also accepted appointments at Southern Illinois University in 1963 when I did. Wayne Leys came in January 1964, and Paul Schilpp (Stanford Ph.D.) with the Library of Living Philosophers came in the fall of 1965.

Perhaps I should add that when the Eameses and I moved to Carbondale we were joined by a few very able graduate students. For example, Joseph S. Wu and Cho-Yee To transferred from Washington University, but Cho-Yee did his Ph.D. in Educational Foundations. Both of them as students were helpful on some Chinese material on Dewey, as were various of our other Chinese students, and they have outstanding postdoctoral records. Bruce A. Jannusch and Anthony Roda are two other able transfers.

Among the philosophers on visiting appointment here after 1963 were Professor N.A Nikam, whom I mentioned above. He was quite helpful on things relating to India and international philosophy. Professor Constant C. C. Chang from Taiwan Normal University, who was at Washington University on a Fulbright, also had one at SIUC. W. R. Den-nes (Oxford), one of my former professors at Berkeley, was here for a semester. David B. Richardson (Toronto), philosophy of culture and Chinese influences on the West, was with us in 1964.

The roster of later regular departmental members is an impressive one. They make worthy additions to the earlier ones listed and continue the pluralistic tradition. In 1966 three future chairs of the Department came to us: David S. Clarke, Jr. (Emory), with interests in philosophy of language, semiotic, Peirce, logic, and philosophy of mind; John Howie (Boston), specializing in philosophy of religion, ethics, American idealism, and medical ethics, and editor of various volumes of Leys Memorial Lectures; and Matthew J. Kelly (Notre Dame), Aquinas and the Scholastics and their influence on early modern philosophy, and Greek philosophy. Garth J. Gillan (Duquesne), who came in 1969, is a well known scholar-teacher with impressive publications in critical theory, continental philosophy, phenomenology, and Marxism. One of our most distinguished professors, Risieri Frondizi, native of Argentina, was here from 1970 to 1979. He offered seminars on theory of value and courses on Nietzsche and Existentialism. He was a permanent member of the International Institute of Philosophy, a past president of the lnteramerican Society of Philosophy, and a member of the executive committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. Donald Ihde (Boston), interested primarily in phenomenology and existentialism and the phenomenology of man-made machines, was with us in 1968 and 1969. Richard C. Howard (Texas), who was then working mainly on Marxism and phenomenology was here about the same time. Douglas M. Allen (Vanderbilt) taught Eastern Philosophy and Religion here from 1967 to 1972 during the Viet Nam War.

Two of our former faculty members were finalists for the Council of Graduate Schools Arlt Award in 1976 for best book by a young philosopher: Michael Audi (Johns Hopkins), philosophy of science, and Ben L. Mijuskovic (California, San Diego), history of philosophy. John F. Hayward (Chicago) came here in 1968 as Chair of Religious Studies and had affiliated status with us. He worked on myth, art, and symbol as modes of imagination. Bhagwan B. Singh (SUNY Buffalo), native of Northern India and author of The Self and the World in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce ( 1973), from 1973 to 1976 taught Eastern Philosophy and Religion here. He also conducted summer workshops in India and taught popular evening classes in Yoga through our Office of Continuing Education. We lost him as part of the retrenchment program.

His briefing for my wife and me and our teenage daughter Sharon before our trip to India in December 1975 and January 1976 for me to attend philosophy conferences and for them to see more of India was invaluable. George Schedler (California at San Diego; JD, SIUC), who came in 1977, brought us more light on Marcusé. A productive scholar, his central interests include philosophy of law, social philosophy, ethics, Marxism, and Rawls. Mark Johnson (Chicago), who also joined us in 1977 and left in 1994, was interested in aesthetics, philosophy of language, and cognitive science and did innovative work on problems of metaphor and the metaphorical structures of the human conceptual system. We were sorry to lose him to the University of Oregon.

Stephen Tyman (Toronto) came to us in 1980 with interests in eighteenth and nineteenth century European philosophy, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, phenomenology, and existentialism. Robert A. Hahn (Yale) joined us in 1982. His central interests are Greek philosophy and the history of science, Kant, and the history of philosophy. He has conducted summer workshops in Greece and Egypt and was a prime mover in Philosophical Collaborations, a series of conferences for faculty and graduate student interaction involving SIUC and other universities. Thomas Alexander has been with us since 1988. Very active both as a philosopher and as a colleague, he is interested in American philosophy, aesthetics, political and social philosophy, Dewey, and Greek philosophy. Eugenie Gatens-Robinson (SIUC) joined our department also in 1988 with a strong background in both science and philosophy. Her central interests are philosophy and history of science, philosophy of nature, medical humanities, and feminism. She is winning international recognition.

The past six years have brought us six more very able and diverse recruits. Donna M. Summerfield (Notre Dame) came to us in 1990 as a recognized scholar for her work on Wittgenstein, theory of knowledge, and history of analytic philosophy and since coming has heightened the recognition. Andrew G. Black (Massachusetts), who came in 1991, is interested in early modern philosophy, logic, and Leibniz. Thomas Gaskill (Vanderbilt) joined us in 1993 and has given a new slant to our Eastern Philosophy and Religion with his interests in Islamic and South Asian philosophy, ethics, economics, and the construction of communities. In that same year Larry Hickman (Texas, Austin) came here with a joint appointment as Director of the Center for Dewey Studies and Professor of Philosophy. Among his central interests are philosophy of technology, classical American philosophy, philosophy of the visual media, phenomenology, pragmatism, and technology and science. Our fifth recruit, Pat A. Manfredi (Notre Dame), came in 1993 with interests in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and psychology, cognitive science, analytic philosophy, and action theory. Our final addition, Anthony Steinbock (SUNY-Stony Brook), who came in 1995, did his doctoral dissertation under Donn Welton, who in turn took his Ph.D. with us in 1973. Steinbock is interested in contemporary French and German philosophy, phenomenology, social ontology, and aesthetics. In his first year with us he conducted a very well attended conference here on the Husserlian theme of "Back to the Things Themselves."

In 1997 John Howie and David Clarke retired, we made two strong new appointments: Douglas Rice(University of Massachusetts, Amherst), with interest in history and philosophy of science, history of philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, logic, and metaphysics, and as our new chair, Kenneth W. Stikkers (De Paul University), with interests in contemporary continental philosophy, ethics and value philosophy, William James, social-political philosophy, philosophy of economics, and American social and intellectual history. In 1998 we happily added Janice M. Staab (Pennsylvania State University). She brings added strength in Classical American Philosophy, especially Peirce, philosophy of science, Feminist Philosophy and philosophy of science, and history of philosophy.

It is easy to see why a contextualist like myself would be very much at home in a department of this sort, and it is also easy to see why, as I tell placement officers who are looking for new faculty, our graduates are as different among themselves as are many who come from quite different graduate programs although we hope our pluralistic emphasis strengthens each of them. Whereas in recent years many of this country’s graduate programs in philosophy appear to have neglected American philosophy in favor of a concentration on either Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy of a logical or ordinary language variety or on European philosophy, as a minimum we want our students to have a choice of the three or some combination thereof. As pluralists we agree with William James and Shakespeare’s Hamlet in telling Horatios who restrict themselves to a single philosophy that there are holding indeed more things in the world than are dreamt of in their philosophy. If we seek light, it is ill-advised to limit ourselves to a single source of illumination. It also seems to me that Whitehead is correct in holding that a basic function of universities is to bring mature scholars and young eager learners together, and in their coming together it is not only the younger who learn. In a graduate program, moreover, students learn not merely from the teachers but also from their fellow students, and the diversity of our graduate students strengthens our pluralism. Geographically, our students come not merely from this country but from many other parts of the world, for example, from India, Indonesia, areas where Chinese is spoken, Germany, France, Turkey, and Latin America. Philosophically, they are also highly diverse. I have been acquainted with most of our graduates, and I cannot think of a single one from whom I have not learned something. So any listing is a sample and not intended to be exclusive. Why should not both their fellow students and my colleagues and I learn from such people as the late John Broyer, Bina Gupta, Sevin Kunt, Bea Stegeman (Ann), Ken Cooley, Tu Li, Te Chen, David Kuo, Pat Fitzgerald, Joe Wu, Martin Lu, Melvin Tuggle, John Holder, Conrad Koehler, Wesley Teo, Cedric Pan, Betty Rahn Gurley, George Sun, Ralf Sommermeier, Krishna Mohan, Rama Rao Pappu, Scott Kramer, Don Mikula, Mike Gillespie, Tom Place, Yeu-Quang Wong, and P. J. Yoon? Since the days when Ken Cooley was in residence our students have published their own journal, Kinesis, which includes papers by students from other graduate programs as well as our own and also occasionally publishes interviews with leading philosophers.

A further component of a good pluralistic program is good research materials, and I have been instrumental in helping make Morris Library one of the country’s leading research centers for American Philosophy, having helped us get the Paul Carus Open Court Archives, Dewey’s personal library and manuscripts as well as the papers of various other pragmatists, the Pepper Papers, the Paul Weiss materials, the Abraham Edel Papers, and so on, not to mention helping get more Foundation for Philosophy of Creativity Records. Also, of course, my papers will eventually go to Special Collections. It may be interesting to note that I first became interested in the Open Court Records when Miss Elisabeth Carus told me at a philosophy meeting, I think in Vienna, that she was fairly sure that she still had the original manuscript of Dewey’s Carus Lectures, Experience and Nature, and would be glad to show it to me. Although this manuscript never turned up, the search for it led me through extensive bodies of Open Court materials.

Since 1981 most of my time has been devoted to the Library of Living Philosophers, and I have taught no regular courses, but I continue to serve on some doctoral dissertation committees and to attend sessions of Agora, our graduate student group for presentation of work in progress. My position as Editor of the LLP necessitates my doing research on some of the world’s greatest living philosophers, and with the late Professor Paul Schilpp I have co-edited volumes on Gabriel Marcel, W. V. Quine, and G. H. von Wright. In addition I have edited volumes on Hartshorne, A. J. Ayer, Ricoeur, Paul Weiss, H. G. Gadamer, and Chisholm, and I have been working on volumes on Donald Davidson, Sir Peter Strawson, Habermas, S. H. Nasr, Marjorie Greene, and Thomas S. Kuhn, but the premature death of Kuhn has halted work on him. Invitations to me to present keynote addresses at international conferences on comparative philosophy and culture in Macao and Taipei have led me to do some research on major points of agreement and difference between my pragmatic naturalism (contextualism) and traditional Eastern views.

In my time I have served on a full complement of committees and projects from Departmental ones to Blue Ribbon University ones, participating for years, for example, in the Mississippi Valley Investigations Committee on International Studies and Research; and on 15 May 1993 I received a Distinguished Service Award from SIUC. Even after leaving St. Louis, from 1963 to 1973 1 continued as Critic for a monthly meeting each year of the St. Louis Poetry Center, reading a paper and commenting on a number of poems presented in advance for criticism. I have also continued to work on national and international professional committees. To mention a few not previously listed, I served for many years as a Consultant-Evaluator for the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools and on the American Philosophical Association Committee on International Cooperation, 1967-80; Chair, Committee for International Travel Grants, 1972-78; APA delegate to various international and world congresses of philosophy; now serve on the APA History Project; and I received the First Award for Exceptional Service from the Western (Central) Division of the APA, April 1980. In 1965 I participated as a panel member in the White House Conference on International Cooperation and worked with various follow-up committees, and from 1965 to 1967 I was a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. I served as Chair of the Committee to Prepare the Advanced Test in Philosophy, Graduate Record Examinations, Educational Testing Service, 1963-72; and I was named Directory of American Philosophers Man of the Year in Philosophy, 1966-67. In view of my research pattern and the fact that I taught American Philosophy, it is not surprising that I was in 1972 one of the Founders of The Society for Advancement of American Philosophy, which in March 1988 presented me with the Schneider Award for Lifetime Achievement, and that I was a member of the Organizing Committee for the International Bicentennial Symposium on Philosophy in the Life of a Nation, New York City, 7-10 October 1976. This symposium was sponsored by the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, various philosophical associations in this country, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Incidentally, I have participated in all but one of the regular congresses of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies since 1963. 1 have also been active in the Society for Philosophy of Creativity and the Foundation for Philosophy of Creativity Board, and on 26 April 1990 the former awarded me a Distinguished Service Life Membership. Similarly, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology made me an honorary life member in 1980. But for a somewhat fuller list of my professional affiliations see the biographical item on me in Who’s Who in America (1995) and Who’s Who in the World (1996).

But now I wish to supplement if and as needed background on the other chapters of this book, presenting the material chronologically rather than in the order of the chapters. As I intimated earlier, I presented a paper on "Reflective Inquiry and Language" for the very large Indian World Congress of Philosophy in Delhi 28 December 1975 to 3 January 1976, and the American Philosophical Association named me as its official spokesman for the congress. I also presented a paper on "Pragmatism and Progress" for the much smaller International Society for Metaphysics meeting 6-10 January 1976 in Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s Place of Peace near Calcutta, and lectured at Banaras Hindu University on Dewey’s Philosophic Method. For criticism and comments at the Santiniketan meetings I was paired with Professor Margaret Chatterjee, University of Delhi. Incidentally, while I was in Santiniketan the rest of the Hahns flew to Bhubaneswar to see the thirteenth century sun temple of Konorak and the sights of Puri on the Bay of Bengal. Rich in historical and philosophical background and artistic traditions, complex in social and religious framework, diverse and involved politically, and twenty years ago marked by sharp contrasts between affluent and poor, India is a vast subcontinent, and we visited mainly in the northern and central portions, Bombay being our furthest point south, but with the help of Indian friends we saw a rewarding number of sights. For instance, we saw the great palaces, tombs, and forts of the Mogul emperors in Delhi, the national capital, and in Agra, site of the Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world with its marvellous inlaid ivory and light effects. We also visited the beautiful Mogul city of Jaipur, the pink city, and the temples and caves of Ellora and Ajanta. We also spent some time, of course, in Varanasi on the Ganges, center of both Hinduism and Jainism and with Sarnath only six miles away important also for Buddhism. Gautama Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon there some 2500 years ago. In Bombay, on the Arabian Sea, center for another ancient religious group, the Parsis, we made memorable visits both by day and night to the Malabar Hill Hanging Gardens, with the Towers of Silence in the background. Muslim mosques also were to be found in any of the big cities as well as in many of the smaller ones.

In 1979 my wife Elizabeth and I went to the Far East, where Fu Jen Catholic University, Hsin-chuang, Taipei Hsien, Republic of China, was celebrating its golden anniversary with an international congress of philosophy, and Hartshorne and I were among the twenty philosophers from abroad along with a much larger number of Chinese philosophers participating in the congress. I presented an address on "A Contextualistic Philosophy of Life" and chaired a session. The congress afforded an excellent opportunity for a cultural exchange of ideas and experiences of mutual concern in light of current philosophical attitudes, both East and West, toward philosophy of life and religion. President Lokuang, Dean Paul S. Y. Hsiao, Chair Aloysius C. T. Chang, and the other planners of the congress, moreover, arranged not merely for excellent sessions on contemporary problems of philosophy and religion but also for a post-congress tour of Taiwan to show participants from abroad something of cultural, agricultural, and industrial developments and for social functions hosted by such people as the national Premier, the Minister of Education, the Provincial Governor, and Director of the world-famous National Palace Museum, and officials of the China Shipbuilding Company and the China Steelworks.

Since I have many former graduate students in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the trip gave me and my wife an opportunity to see once more numerous old friends as well as to meet many new people in philosophy, education, and political, economic, and cultural affairs. I also presented eight lectures at various universities in the East, namely, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Singapore, College (just becoming University) of Chinese Culture, Taipei, National Taiwan University, Taipei, National Taiwan Normal University, and Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, on "John Dewey’s World Hypothesis," "Aesthetics and Education," "Philosophical Ideas in Literature," and "Why We Need Poets."

In Hong Kong I spoke on topics cleared with Shu-hsien Liu, Chair, Philosophy, and Cho-yee To, Director, School of Education, although the former was attending conferences in the United States when we were there, but there were still at least five of my former students there when we visited: Cho-yee To, Te Chen, Tu Li, Chang-yuan Liu, and Shui-chuen Lee. Martin Lu and Cedric Pan helped plan our Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Taipei loop, and the latter had excellent specific suggestions for a month or more of touring if only we had had the time.

For my presentations in Taiwan and our edification there numerous friends were most helpful: for example, Constant C. C. Chang, Chen-hua Huang, at that time Chair, Philosophy, National Taiwan University, Wen-tan Liu, Elmer H. H. Fung, then Chair, Philosophy, Tunghai University, Edward S.C. Wang, then Chair of English language and Literature at the College of Chinese Culture, Fuh-kwen Liu, Chung-ming Tse of Tunghai University, not to mention our friends at Fu Jen Catholic University and George Sun, who wrote various friends to help look out for us. Constant Chang had a gourmet Chinese banquet for us with an impressive list of guests, including Archbishop Lokuang, various government officials, and Dr. De-cheng Kong, a lineal descendant of Confucius. Chang also translated into Chinese summaries of my presentations at different universities and along with others, helped us enjoy Chinese opera and saw to it that we got to the National Palace Museum. Former student Dr. David Kuo arranged for his father General Kuo (Li-chou) to host a dinner for us. One of the most receptive audiences for my presentation on Philosophical Ideas in Literature was at Tunghai University where a class of students studying American literature attended as a group. They followed me for hours to raise more questions.

Professor W. J. Kilgore, President of the Interamerican Philosophical Society invited me to organize and contribute a paper to a colloquium on the Philosophy of Stephen C. Pepper for the XIth Interamerican Congress of Philosophy in Guadalajara, Mexico, 10-15 November 1985. I was also invited to participate in a symposium organized by the Foundation for Philosophy of Creativity at this congress and did so. The papers for the colloquium were: George C. H. Sun, University of South Alabama, "Stephen C. Pepper and Chinese Philosophy of Art: An East-West Dialogue on Aesthetics"; Paul G. Kuntz, Emory University, "The Order of the World and World Hypotheses"; and Lewis E. Hahn, "Aesthetic Quality and Ordered Conflict."

I was invited to participate in the International Society for Metaphysics Conference on Metaphysics, Culture, and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, 3-7 August 1987 and to present a keynote address and conduct a seminar on "Philosophy, Education, and the Art of Leadership" for the International Symposium on the Philosophy of Thomé H. Fang in Taipei 16-18 August 1987. At both I saw numerous friends, and in addition to good programs each had interesting supplementary activities. Our hosts at Kyoto University guided those of us from abroad who wanted to go for a day in Nara, ancient capital of Japan; and the planners of the Fang Symposium had many supplementary events of which I shall mention only a few: visits to the National Palace Art Museum, the museum residence of the great artist Chang Ta-ch’ien, and a dinner at the home of Mrs. Lindy Hsu,[2] artist friend of Thomé Fang. Among the Executive Committee members were President Chen-hua Huang, now of Chinese Culture University, Executive Director Fuh-kwen Liu, Dean Hu Hsiang Fung of National Central University, Aloysius Chang, George Sun, and Edward S. C. Wang. George Sun, Shu-hsien Liu, and Dean Fung arranged for me to visit President Ta-you Wu of the Academia Sinica who also administers the Hu Shih Memorial, and I got some helpful materials from him about Dewey and Hu Shih and what is being done about them in Beijing. In Kyoto I had become acquainted with Vice President Lu Jun of the Academy for Chinese Culture in Beijing; and although he himself is a Confucian scholar, he promised the next time I was in Beijing to put me in touch with the scholars who are working on the Hu Shih materials. Tentatively we agreed on late summer of 1989, but, of course, the June 4 crushing of student protests in Beijing put that on hold.

For my keynote address on "Thomé H. Fang and the Spirit of Chinese Philosophy," which George Sun translated into Chinese after I finished each paragraph, I commented on certain similarities between his outlook and my contextualistic view: both stress change and novelty, both oppose dualisms and the method of bifurcation, both are open to new systems of ideas, cultural patterns, and ways of doing things, and both think of analysis as essentially a genetic affair of tracing tendencies. I suggested that the symposium celebrated the common devotion of the participants to his ideal of improved mutual understanding between peoples and nations. Largely from Thomé Fang and his students, some of whom are also students of mine, I have learned to discover parallels between my naturalistic pragmatism and the classic Eastern philosophies.

I was invited to present a keynote address also for Chinese Culture University’s International Symposium on Comparative Studies of Eastern Philosophy, 16-18 August 1989 in Taipei, and once more but with different applications, I stressed parallels between Contextualism and various traditional Chinese outlooks: (1) their common stress on time and change, (2) their use of genetic analysis, (3) their naturalistic approach, and (4) their emphasis on education, the human community, and democracy.

Between the 1989 date of the above address and the 1993 date of the next one to be commented on some major changes have occurred in my personal life. In the summer of 1991, EIizabeth my wife of many years passed away after a lengthy illness, and in September 1992 I married Mary Anne King, widow of Marine Corps Brigadier General Louis King. She shares my interest in genealogy, and we are working on the Hahn Family History. She enjoys travel, and we have driven thousands of miles to philosophical meetings and other events and have flown several times that number for me to participate in international philosophical meetings. In 1993, for example, we made two trips to the Far East and one to Europe as well as three trips for philosophy meetings in this country. Our first trip to the Orient was occasioned by my being invited to present a keynote address in early March for an international symposium in Macao celebrating 450 years of Macao as a gateway of East-West cultural interchange. Macao is a Portuguese territory on the Southeast China coast, about 35 miles from British Crown Colony Hong Kong, one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and like Hong Kong it is scheduled to be returned to the People’s Republic of China before the year 2000, Hong Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999. When our friends heard that we had agreed to visit Macao, we received invitations to Hong Kong and Taipei.

We stayed at a Chinese University of Hong Kong guest house, and on March 1 I lectured on "The Library of Living Philosophers and World Dialogue in Philosophy." The University has many faculty members of world renown who have studied or taught at Southern Illinois University, and with the leadership of Shu-hsien Liu and Te Chen, they and their colleagues are wonderfully hospitable. Roger Ames of Hawaii was also there and participated in the discussion after my presentation.

For the Macao conference on 4 March 1993 I spoke on "Enhancing Cultural Interflow between East and West," discussing three sets of parallels between my form of Contextualism and some interpretations of the Eastern views of Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism: (1) their common stress on time and change, (2) their naturalistic approach, and (3) their accounts of creativity, education, and novelty. Among the familiar faces we saw in Macao were those of Ko-wang Mei, head of the Taiwan delegation to the conference and president and founder of the Taiwan Regional Development Institute, our host for the visit to Taiwan after Macao. Some others in attendance were Ramakrishna Puligandla, K. S. Murty, Kenneth Inada, Joseph S. Wu, Chung-Ying Cheng, George Sun, Robert Greenwood, and Fred G. Sturm.

Dr. Mei characterized his institute as a combined "thinking tank, consulting agency, and training center." Under the sponsorship of his institute and China TV on 7 March 1993 I presented a televised address, for which there was also a studio audience, on "John Dewey, Hu Shih, and Thomé H. Fang," which was translated paragraph by paragraph into Chinese by my former student Dr. George C. H. Sun. Starting with Dewey’s visit to the Far East between 1919 and 1921, I sketched the roles of Hu Shih and Thomé Fang in connection with his trip and the relations between their philosophies. Chair Dr. Mei drew some parallels between Dr. Sun’s translating for me and Dewey’s experience more than seventy years earlier in having his lectures translated by former graduate students. Among the highlights of our visit were a banquet hosted by General and Mrs. Wang Sheng (the general was a former student of Fang), a few visits to the National Palace Museum, and an interview with General Wego Chiang, son of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Our second trip to the Far East in 1993 was for me to give a keynote address on "Contextualists and Chinese Philosophers" for the Second Chinese Culture University International Symposium on Comparative Studies of Eastern and Western Philosophy in Taipei June 10-12. In my address I surveyed five parallels between American Contextualists and Chinese Taoists and Confucians in dealing with people, nature or environment, and their relations to one another: (1) their common stress on continuity between people and their environment, (2) their rejection of dualisms, (3) their naturalistic account of human nature as basically good, (4) their agreement on the presence of moral and aesthetic values in our world, and (5) their shared appreciation of nature. After the conference my former student Dr. Tu Li and wife Hay-ying Fung took us for further visits to the National Palace Museum and to various other points of interest. For the last day in Taipei Chair of the Symposium Professor Chen-hua Huang and wife Judy took us in charge, taking us to a Zen Buddhist Temple high in the hills which was a favorite of Thomé Fang’s and to the famous author-philosopher Lin Yutang’s home, which is now a museum. Another highlight Mary Anne especially enjoyed was that we spent the last few nights at the renowned Grand Hotel, a great favorite of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s.

In August, 1994 Mary Anne and I flew to Honolulu, where I participated in a small international conference on creativity and ideation science sponsored by the Japanese Society for Creativity and the U.S. Foundation for Philosophy of Creativity. It was a follow-up on a session on creativity at the August 1993 World Congress of Philosophy in Moscow attended by the president of the Japanese Society for Creativity, who is a pharmacist. He was intrigued by the questions he got from philosophers on his paper and invited our group to have a joint session with them in Japan, but this sounded too expensive to us. So he suggested we try to find an intermediate site for a conference. Accordingly, Yukio Murakami, a biochemist specializing in vitamin B 12 who is executive officer of their organizationmailto:or@tion

, and Larry Cobb, a political scientist interested in organizational theory who is Executive Director for the Foundation for Philosophy of Creativity, eventually decided on Tokai University in Honolulu as the site for the conference.

With the East-West Center and various other international organizations in Hawaii, it proved to be an excellent place for our meetings. Moreover, Tokai University is only a few blocks from Waikiki Beach. The Japanese wanted to keep the number of participants small to facilitate communication, and the number turned out to be even fewer than planned. Of the eight participants four were Japanese, one of whom was a librarian of agriculture and technology and the others were primarily biochemists and engineers. Another participant, Dr. Pattabi Raman, was a native of India who had been away from there for thirty years or so. He was originally in medical chemistry but now directs a center for promotion of learning abilities in Bremerton, Washington. He was considering doing a primer on Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Two of the three from the U. S. delegation, Pete Gunter and myself, are philosophers, and the third, Larry Cobb, as noted above is a political scientist who was a student at SIUC of Henry N. Wieman.

In 1994 we also had philosophy meetings in Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City, Chicago, Springfield, Illinois, and Boston. And we spent a great deal of time on a Hahn Family History we are working on. In October we attended a Hahn Family Reunion in Hickory, North Carolina where I was the featured guest speaker, holding forth on my Great-Great-Grandfather Joshua Hahn. Our branch of the family moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Missouri and Illinois before settling in Texas. Most of the Hahns in Hickory are descendants of Johannes Hahn, and some think that the Texas ones are also. At any rate, the North Carolina Hahns also claim Joshua. Johannes and many of his family are buried in North Carolina.[3]

On the way back home we spent a couple of days doing genealogical work in Grainger County, Tennessee, and in the very helpful Tennessee State Library in Nashville. Mary Anne was checking on her ancestors the Kitts and the Outlands (originally Dutch) both in Grainger County and in the State Library and Archives. I checked mainly on my maternal line. Grandmother Cinnie Carmichael Brewster was born in Tennessee, and I found material on both the Carmichaels and the Prigmores (her grandfather was Thomas Prigmore). In an item he wrote for a book on veterans of the War of 1812 he claimed to be of French descent, but I had always thought ‘Prigmores’ was a very un-French sounding name. Some years ago, however, Cousin June Welch, lawyer and historian of Dallas, provided me with ample background on Thomas Prigmore’s lineage, tracing the family back to French Huguenots who sailed from Holland to New Orleans.

The European spelling of the name, however, was uncertain. Another matter we found quite interesting although so far as we know they are not kin to us concerned the Melungeons. The secretary of the Grainger County Historical Society (a Mr. Collins) is a Melungeon, which is a Berber word for "white people". Back in remote sections of the Tennessee Appalachians in Hancock County, which adjoins Grainger County, since the early 1800s there have been settlements of Melungeons living in cabins with dirt floors and for the most part keeping to themselves. They were pushed westward from South Carolina by French and English settlers, who thought of them as blacks or Indians in spite of the fact that they claimed to be Portuguese or Spanish and some of them had blue eyes and brown hair. In any event, they are a mysterious but fascinating people who trace themselves back to ancient Phoenicians or Carthaginians (North Arabs, or Moors). There are some tales of customs and rituals parallel to Islamic creeds, for example, North Carolina Indians reported that at the regular ringing of a bell, these people would fall on their knees and pray. Interestingly for some of us, the Melungeons included traditional Portuguese or Spanish names, sometimes with variations, among their own: for example, Lucinda and Mahala among others.

One other exciting development of 1993 and 1994 was that one of my former students, Dr. John Patrick Fitzgerald, Professor of Philosophy and Video at Seminole Community College near Orlando, Florida, began planning with his video associates to develop a series of Philosophical Portraits based on the LLP. The project sounds like a marvelous way of bringing the Library to an intellectual public who have not been reading our volumes. Making some of the best in contemporary philosophy available for lay persons should serve an important need. Fitzgerald is seeking funding for it, and we taped some preliminary material on it in Atlanta in December 1993.

In 1995 I had philosophy meetings at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, just out of Boston, Chicago, Austin, Texas, New York, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Budapest. So in March we drove to Bentley College for the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy and found the area looking like an icy wonderland but a bit slippery when we got off the main highway. On the way back home we swung by Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where according to Great-Uncle John the first Hahn in our line, Christian, brought his family from Germany in 1784. A government book on survivor of the Revolutionary War lists three different Hahns claiming survivors’ benefits on the basis of Christian’s war service, and one of them received them. At any rate, what with the Amish with their horses and buggies and candles in front windows, it is picturesque country.

Of the other interesting trips for the year I shall comment on only one. In September (15-28) we participated in the Citizen Ambassador Program Delegation Trip to Russia and Hungary. This program is a spin-off of the old Eisenhower program of good will people to people ambassadors. We visited St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Budapest. We philosophers wanted to see what was happening in philosophy after the political changes of the past few years. In the old Soviet Union philosophy was a key subject required of everyone and was well funded. In the new set-up, their philosophers assured us, philosophy is still important; but what with inflation, funding for all university subjects is very difficult to come by, and philosophers must struggle to support themselves and their families. In the old system there was only one philosophy, Materialism or Dialectical Materialism, but it was reinterpreted by each Communist dictator. So one needed philosophy to follow the changes. Now there are still some Communists, but many of the philosophers we conferred with are looking to traditional Russian views or to other Western philosophies in their reconstruction of Russian philosophy. In spite of their problems, both Russia and Hungary may well be on the threshold of new developments, and I wanted to recruit critics for various of our LLP volumes and did get some in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

There was also, of course, some room for sightseeing, and in addition to what we philosophers saw in spite of our tightly packed program, there was a special program for the spouses, or guests, as the Ambassador Program called them; and in some ways Mary Anne saw more than I. St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Budapest are spectacular cities; but to mention only two items for St. Petersburg, we saw the art treasures newly brought to fight the Russians had hidden behind concrete walls in World War II, and we had about a half day boat trip on canals and the Neva River. In Moscow we visited the Kremlin and Red Square with the Armory Museum, walked through Cathedral Square, visited St. Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s Tomb, and had our choice of the Russian Circus or the Bolshoi Ballet. Perhaps I should mention also a trip to New Maiden’s Convent, where we visited a functioning Russian Orthodox Church.

Budapest, sometimes referred to as the Paris of South East Europe, goes back to the Celts and ancient Roman and other ruins. With the Danube and the mountains on either side one has picturesque views wherever one looks. The father of one of our delegates (Les Muray) was a freedom fighter in great trouble with the government, and Les was born there. So we got many interesting comments from him. A highlight for me was a surprise birthday dinner in my honor. The new Central European University with its interdisciplinary programs and publishing program, partly supported by the Soros Foundation, also should be mentioned. For example, LLP subject Sir Karl Popper left some of his papers to this university.

In 1996 we had another round of interesting trips, and one of the most important for my purposes was the St. Louis University Wade Memorial Conference on Globalization (October 17-19). Jürgen Habermas, distinguished German philosopher and subject of a forthcoming LLP volume, was a featured speaker, and some contributors to his volume as well as to the Gadamer one, which came out later this year, participated. So it was a fine occasion for me to confer with them.

It is amazing how fast 1997 moved along for us, what with professional philosophy meetings in Albuquerque, Austin, Texas, Memphis, TN, and Philadelphia, genealogical trips, and a full round of activities here at home. One of the most notable of the professional philosophy meetings was an October Centennial Conference in Austin for Charles Hartshorne, who was 100 on June 5. The University of Texas Department of Philosophy thought, I think correctly, that having the conference in October would be better for both faculty and students than one in June. Charles was in good spirits and still mentally sharp. He hopes to live until the year 2001 so that so far as he and I know he will become the only philosopher to have lived in three different centuries, and it looks as if he may very well make it.

In 1997 I agreed to serve on the International Board of Advisors for the International Institute for Field-Being, of which Professor Lik Kuen Tong is Director. Both he and I think that my contextualism fits in very well with his field-being and anti-substantialism.

On the score of genealogy, we attended the Silkwood Family Reunion in Waco in June and got further information on my Great Grandmother Martha (Patsy) Silkwood Hahn’s family. We saw Dorothy and Dewey Railsback there also (she is a granddaughter of my father’s oldest brother Henry). Other helpful places for our work include the Texas State Archives and the Texas State Land Office in Austin, where we discovered that Henry and Martha had grants from the Republic of Texas for land both in Denton County and Collin County before moving to Cooke County (both of the grants being listed as Fannin County, the parent county for several counties). We also received help from County Courthouses and local genealogical societies in Gainesville, Denton, and Aspermont, Texas as well as in Greene and Pike Counties, Illinois. Hill College, Hillsboro, Texas has excellent Confederate Way Records for Family History, and through interlibrary loan we have been getting useful census and other material from all over the country. Mary Anne has something in process most of the time on such sources. We visited this year Henry and Peggy Hahn in Portales, New Mexico (Henry is a grandson of my Great-Uncle John), Mike Mitchell and family and Bill and Cleo Hahn in Post, Texas (Mike is a son of Aunt Vina and Uncle Pat, and Bill is the youngest son of Uncle Jim), Aunt Madie, then 92, and her family, and Oscar and Dorothy Dickerson (she is a daughter of my father’s youngest sister Ruth Hays), and various other relatives.

1998 promises to be an exciting year for us. In March we went to Milwaukee for the annual meeting of the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy, and I was presented with the Society’s Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Spring issue of Perspectives: Research and Creative Activities at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale contained an excellent article by Marilyn Davis, Editor of Perspectives, on "Meeting of the Minds: The Library of Living Philosophers Celebrates 60 Years of Dialogue" based on interviews with me and her own investigations. The World Congress of Philosophy, which meets every five years, at its meeting in Boston in August of this year, is also planning a session celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Paul Arthur Schilpp’s initiation of the Library. There was also a round table session on "The Library of Living Philosophers and World Dialogue" at its meeting in Moscow in 1993, for which I made the initial presentation.

We are looking forward to several other professional meetings this year: in May the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association Central Division in Chicago and in December the APA Eastern Division in Washington, D.C. In August the Second Symposium on Field-Being and the Non-Substantialistic Turn (Part I) will meet in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Part II of this symposium will meet in Boston in conjunction with the World Congress. The Department of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale has announced an international conference here on September 25 and 26 on the theme "The World in Perspective" in honor of my ninetieth birthday, and, of course, both Mary Anne and I are very much looking forward to the event.