Paul Edwards (philosopher)

Paul Edwards (born September 2, 1923 in Vienna as Paul Eisenstein , † December 9, 2004 in New York ) was an American philosopher and encyclopedia .

biography

Paul Eisenstein was born as the youngest of three brothers into a family that, although of Jewish origin, had emancipated itself from all religion. He attended the renowned Academic Gymnasium in Vienna. After Austria's “Anschluss” to Germany in 1938, his parents sent him to live with friends in Scotland. When the rest of the family emigrated to Australia , they brought him there. In Australia, the Eisensteins changed their name to Edwards.

In Melbourne Paul Edwards graduated from high school and graduated from the University of Melbourne his BA and MA in philosophy. In 1947 he went to Columbia University in New York as a research fellow , where he completed his doctoral thesis. Except for a brief teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, Edwards remained from now in New York, where he, alongside his work on the "Columbia", the "Brooklyn College" and at the New School for Social Research taught .

In the 1940s, while he was writing his dissertation, Edwards met Bertrand Russell , whose basic philosophy he preferred to that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was in great demand at the time . He edited Russell's influential popular text, Why I'm Not a Christian, with a dedicated afterword, and remained personally connected to Russell for a lifetime. Another meeting, the one with Wilhelm Reich in the autumn of 1947, may have had an even greater impact on him. He reported on it in 1974 on a BBC program: “At that time Reich had a large, enthusiastic following, especially among intellectuals, whose sympathies were clearly with the left, but who, like Reich, were completely disappointed by the development of communism in Russia. The enthusiasm for Reich was not directed to his orgone theory, which was viewed rather skeptically by many of his admirers; it was mainly about his new therapy [and] the impression that Reich had gained a new and deeper insight into the causes of the misery of mankind. [...] Many of my friends and I saw Reich as a kind of messiah at the time. "

Edwards was a determined rationalist and atheist all his life . As such, he was active in various humanistic organizations in addition to his continuous activity as a university lecturer . Journalistically, he repeatedly advocated conceptual and intellectual clarity and polemicized against philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger , whose voluminous writings he largely considered pompous nonsense and preferred to expose them as such.

At the end of a series of lectures that he gave at the New School for Social Research in 1995, he named three sentences that should be chiseled into his tombstone:

• He has proven the nullity of Heidegger's philosophy.
• He opposed Freudian therapy, but not all of Freudian theory.
• He tried to revive the interest in Reich's psychiatry .

Paul Edwards died in New York on December 9, 2004, leaving no direct descendants. His ashes were scattered in the Hudson River at his request .

plant

Paul Edwards has written numerous books and essays. He exerted his great impact on Anglo-Saxon philosophy primarily through two publications: through the reader A modern introduction to philosophy (1957ff), edited together with Arthur Pap and widely distributed among philosophy students, and above all through his position as editor-in-chief “In the eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), which has been the standard reference work for English-speaking philosophers for decades. After the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy was published in 1998 , Edwards' Encyclopedia was updated and reissued by a new editorial board. Edwards disapproved of the fact that this watered down the original philosophical attitude and, in particular, gave too much space to postmodern authors. Paul Edwards, like his esteemed thinkers Russell and Reich, was not "neutral" in any of his works. He viewed the predominance of religions, without negating their occasional benevolent activities, mainly as downright harmful. A decline in religion, which he sought to promote for life, would be of inestimable value for humanity.

Edwards is (also) considered an analytical philosopher , but for his main concern as a philosopher , for a radical criticism of religion , this Anglo-American school of thought was at best only partially useful. Only Alfred Ayer , along with Bertrand Russell , had achieved merits in this area through a consistently critical attitude. He considered the dissident Freud student Wilhelm Reich to be currently the most advanced critic of religion . Edwards first introduced the theories of this much maligned thinker into academic philosophy in an article as concise as it was lengthy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which he edited . Edwards emphasized Reich's further development of psychoanalysis towards vegetotherapy and particularly valued Reich's insights into the process of psycho-physiological introjection and permanent anchoring of religious feeling in the course of the socialization of the individual, because from them a practical prophylaxis could be developed, the later susceptibility to religiosity - also in their secular manifestations - exclusions. He praised the magazine for political psychology and sex economics published by Reich 1934-39 as being of "extraordinarily high level" and even recommended its only German-language articles on the subject to the Anglophone audience.

Edwards' strong recommendation to his philosophical colleagues that studying Reich was worthwhile was mostly deliberately overlooked. However, a reviewer of the Encyclopedia responded by complaining that Edwards had given twice as much space as the British philosophy, such as Schopenhauer or Schlick, to the "founder of the dubious psychiatric theory of orgone energy intended to stimulate sex life". Edwards replied that the typical prejudice about Reich demonstrated by the critic in that sentence alone justified the length of his article. For one thing, Reich's orgone accumulator has nothing to do with sexual stimulation. On the other hand, his article is not at all about the organ theory of the late Reich; rather, he emphasized that Reich's original insights into the nature of religious and metaphysical longings arose earlier, i.e. independently of it.

Remarks

1. ^ Paul Edwards: The Greatness of Wilhelm Reich. In: The Humanist, March / April 1974; repr. in: Charles A. Garfield (ed.): Rediscovery of the Body. A Psychosomatic View of Life and Death. New York: Dell 1977, pp. 41-50
2. ^ Warren A. Smith: Paul Edwards on Nietzsche, Freud, and Reich. In: Free Inquiry, vol. 16, no. 2, spring 1996, p. 50
3. ↑ Peter Singer: Philosopher insisted on clarity and rigor. To obituary of Paul Edwards. In: The Age (Melbourne, Vic., AUS), January 14, 2005
4. ^ Paul Edwards: Foreword. To: Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Ed. by Gordon Stein. Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books 1985, pp. xi-xiii
5. ↑ Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Philosophers, ed. Stuart Brown et al., London and New York: Routledge 1996
6. ↑ Michael Wreen characterizes Edwards in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (ed. Ted Honderich, 1995, p. 220) as follows: one half an analytical philosopher, the other half a philosopher , d. H. of the mindset of the enlightened French thinkers of the 18th century
7. ↑ Edwards' article on Ayer in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief, op.cit.
8. ^ Paul Edwards: Wilhelm Reich. In: Encyclopedia of Unbelief, op.cit .; some of these articles are now available online: Journal of Political Psychology and Sexual Economics
9. ^ Philip P. Wiener: Review of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In: Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), pp. 616-622; Paul Edwards: Reply to a Review. In: Journal of the History of Ideas, 31 (1970), pp. 143-145

Publications

• The Logic of Moral Discourse. The Free Press, Glencoe 1955; The Free Press, New York 1965
• with Arthur Pap (Ed.): A modern introduction to philosophy: readings from classical and contemporary sources. The Free Press, New York 1957; 1960; 1963; 1965; 1973
• (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 8 volumes. MacMillan, New York 1967
• Buber and Buberism. A critical evaluation. University of Kansas, Lawrence 1970
• Heidegger on Death. A critical evaluation. Hegeler Institute, La Salle 1979
  • Heidegger and death. A critical appreciation. Darmstädter Blätter, Darmstadt 1985, ISBN 3-87139-086-0
• (Ed.): Voltaire: Selections. MacMillan, New York 1989
• (Ed.): Immortality. MacMillan, New York 1992; Prometheus Books, Amherst 1997
• Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Prometheus Books, Amherst 1996; 2002
• Heidegger's Confusions. Prometheus Books, Amherst 2004
• God and the Philosophers. Prometheus Books, Amherst 2009

Web links

• Literature by and about Paul Edwards in the catalog of the German National Library
• http://www.philosopedia.org/index.php/Paul_Edwards - article about Edwards in the Philosopedia (contains various materials: obituaries, pictures, etc.)