Scudder Klyce

Scudder Klyce (born November 7, 1879 in Friendship , Tennessee , † January 28, 1933 in Winchester , Massachusetts ) was an American philosopher , scientist and naval officer. He became famous for his work Universe , which attempted to collect the collective knowledge of mankind in a single book and to offer a solution to all human problems.

Life

Klyce graduated from the University of Arkansas. In his youth he took part in the Spanish-American War and the Filipino Campaign. In 1902 he graduated from the United States Naval Academy , where he later submitted a post-graduate thesis on engineering. In 1908 he married Etheldreda Hovey († 1917). The marriage produced a son, Stephen Klyce. From his second marriage in 1917 with Laura Tilden Kent, the children William Klyce and Dorothy Klyce were born.

On May 2, 1907, Klyce was appointed Commanding under the US Navy. On February 15, 1912, he said goodbye to devote himself to the investigation of foundations of science.

estate

Klyce's estate was given to the Library of Congress by his widow in 1933, where it can still be viewed today. It contains 16 boxes of 4,800 items and is located in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in the James Madison Building on First Street and Independence Avenue, 20540 Washington DC. The estate includes published and unpublished scripts and magazine articles, as well as Klyce's correspondence with contemporaries such as Robert Daniel Carmichael , James McKeen Cattell , Clarence Day , John Dewey , Waldo Frank , Dorothy Canfield Fisher , David Starr Jordan , Robert Andrews Taylor , Theodore William Richards , William Emerson Ritter and Upton Sinclair .

Klyce's philosophical work

Klyce's main work is the book Universe, which he self-published for the first time in 1921. Universe quickly achieved the status of a cult book and an insider tip (there are only 1000 volumes of the first edition) which it still holds today. The book owes its status to the peculiar discrepancy inherent in it, its enormous popularity in philosophical and intellectual circles and, at the same time, largely unread (due to limited circulation).

Universe claims to solve all "why, how and what" problems in science, religion and philosophy. Topics that the book deals with a. Astronomy, light, electricity, heat, chemistry, the spiritual union of the humanities, the inaccuracy of Newton's laws, biology, psychology, the interrelationship between ethics and economics, sociology, the various theories of language in relation to physics, cosmology, energy, matter .

Klyce's second work, "Sins of Science", was published in 1923. In it, Klyce explores the fundamentals of science and religion separately: The main aim of the book is to show how people should be able to achieve happiness and success in life.

Works

• Universe , 1921. (with three introductions by David Starr Jordan, John Dewey and Morris Llewellyn Cooke )
• Sins of Science , 1925.
• Dewey's Suppressed Psychology , 1928. (Correspondence with John Dewey)