Alfred Stiernotte

From Philosopedia

Alfred P. Stiernotte (birth date unknown - 18 May 1972)

Stiernotte was a British Columbian who became a Unitarian.

At the Theological School of St. Lawrence University, according to an evaluation of his work found in the Harvard Square Library, he became known for having transmitted "a vital current of thought which it may well be imperative that religious liberals appropriate yet more fully: the emergent theology explicated by such naturalistic theists as S. Alexander. The importance of this may be intimated by saying that Whitehead was not only deeply influenced by Alexander's thought but hoped for a conflation of his own philosophy with that of Alexander."

In January 1947, Stiernotte moved from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Salt Lake City, becoming an assistant minister to Edwin H. Wilson, who in August 1946 had arrived from Schenectady, New York, and remained until September 1949, when he became the director of the American Humanist Association in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Stiernotte worked with Wilson, becoming the managing editor of The Humanist that Wilson edited and published locally during his time in Utah.

Stiernotte was a research fellow in philosophy at Yale in 1954.

On 14 September 2007, philosopher Peter Singer gave the Alfred E. Stiernotte Lecture at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. The lecture was established in 1984 to honor Stiernotte, who had been a member of the Quinnipiac faculty for sixteen years.

Stiernotte and People's Co-op Books

The People's Co-op Books is over 60 years old. It was Alfred Stiernotte, who was the bookstore's "frontman" in the days when Section 98 of Canada's Criminal Code left Communists like the store's manager in constant peril of arrest and prison.

Stiernotte was one of many British Columbians who established the bookstore, now the city's oldest, as a means to carry on "the struggle against fascism" at the conclusion of the Second World War. The cooperative's charter members included a riveter, a seaman, a machinist, a housewife, a trapper, a conductress, a trade-union official, and a motorman. The point of the enterprise they established in 1945 was to be "more than just a bookselling business", as they declared in their first leaflet. It was also to "stimulate the circulation of books that are socially significant."

Situated at 311 West Pende, it and has continued in the same spirit for the last 22 years at 1391 Commercial Drive.

Works

God and Space-Time, Deity in the Philosophy of Samuel Alexander (1954)

Mysticism and the Modern Mind (editor, 1959)

Frederick May Eliot: An Anthology (editor, 1959)

[[Category:Unitarians