Paul Edwards
From Philosopedia
Photo by Warren Allen Smith
Edwards, Paul (2 September 1923 – 9 December 2004)
Edwards, the Austrian-born American philosopher, “is mixed one part analytic philosopher to one part philosophe,” according to a description by Professor Michael Wreen of Marquette University in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995).
He was then described as being editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 volumes, 1967), “a massive Enlightenment work with a notable analytic sensibility” which “focuses on such traditional philosophical issues as God, free will, immortality, induction, and the nature of value-judgements.”
The Right Honorable Lord Quinton of Trinity College, Oxford, has called the encyclopedia “superior in every way to all its predecessors” and “there has been nothing since to compare with it.”
Edwards, who had been a professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College, New York University, and New School University, wrote the introduction to Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian (1957).
Contents |
The Believers and Non-Believers
In Immortality (1992), Edwards wrote of “Karmic Tribulations” and “The Dependence of Consciousness on the Brain,” providing thirty-four essays by a variety of thinkers on the subjects of survival and immortality.
- Those believing in human survival he listed as
- Aquinas, Descartes, Geach, MacKay, Priestley, and Tertullian.
- Those believing in some form of God without believing in survival, he stated, are
- John Stuart Mill and Voltaire.
- Those who believed in survival without believing in God were
- And of the many who reject both belief in God and in survival were
- A._J._Ayer, Antony_Flew, and David_Hume - he later removed Flew when in his old age he used some hazy, theistic terminology
Views
In his 1995 Prometheus Lecture, a three-part series covering Nietzsche, Freud, and Wilhelm Reich given at New York’s New School for Social Research, Edwards stated that “the elimination of error is almost as important as the discovery of truth.” To the surprise of many and to Edwards's elation, over three hundred attended the lectures, including some who had been in his classes thirty years prior. “Yes,” Edwards emphasized, “I have the anti-religious bug. Freud had it, too, but not Reich. Lucretius had it. So did Nietzsche, Hume, and Bertrand Russell.”
Edwards stated at the lecture series that he did not object to others having their religious beliefs—the Australian aborigines very likely needed such—but he held that any educated individual today who has heard about logical positivism or read the works of contemporary philosophers and persists in mysticism or supernaturalism is not one of his kind. Further, he did not apologize for pointing out their weaknesses.
He cited as a major goal his attempt to separate a philosopher’s bad from his or her good concepts. To avoid weighing the bad and the good is to indulge in shoddy research and would confuse future researchers who, if lazy, would regrettably repeat those falsities and others will then repeat them, also. As examples, he noted the false “facts” that Hume was a deist and that Wittgenstein died a Catholic.
Confirming the individualistic as well as honest approach which Edwards brought to philosophy, Wreen has written that “[a] deep respect for science and common sense mark Edwards’s writings, and he is well known for his use of humour as a lethal weapon against philosophers whom he regards as pompous purveyors of platitudes, especially Heidegger and Tillich.”
In 1996, Edwards wrote a devastating study entitled Reincarnation, A Critical Examination. As to why a rationalist would write about such a patently absurd topic, Edwards’s response was that there is widespread belief in them. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in fact, has never heard an argument for life after death that she does not endorse, he lamented. Whereas some make decisions based on reincarnationist beliefs, he added, others make money on retailing reports of astral adventures. Edwards was at his most devastating in discussing the “interregnum,” where souls await their next body, and the absurdities of “astral clothing.” “The book,” wrote Kenneth Blackwell, “is salutary in revealing the persistence of nonsense and the persisting need for education, logic, and good sense.”
Impact
Long a leader of and inspiration for naturalists, atheists, rationalists, and humanists, Edwards was an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. He once headed the New York American Humanist Association Chapter. In 1983, he was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. In addition to writing the foreword to The Encyclopedia of Unbelief (1985), he signed Manifesto II and was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In addition, Edwards was a contributing editor to Free Inquiry and to Philo.
David Berman, reviewing Edwards’s Immortality in the British New Humanist, was generally favorable and mentioned that the book has an “occasional joke. Thus in his discussion of dualism he mentioned the (supposed) comment of one behaviourist to another: ‘You are fine—how am I?’ ” But he denied that Hume was a “frankly irreligious” philosopher. Berman, however, is intrigued by the Edwards view that “there is probably no consensus against dualism among contemporary philosophers.”
Students smile upon relating that when Edwards lectured and mentioned a name or a work he suspected they had not read, he dramatically exhorted them with “Barbarians, you are barbarians, barbarians! You must read everything ever written by [e.g., Hume] before tomorrow’s class!” On the following day, it was likely that someone in a back row would be questioned about yesterday’s assigned author, whether or not the student was auditing the course or taking it for credit. The front rows of his classes were usually filled to capacity.
Students soon learned, also, not to inquire about Sidney Hook, who at New York University had once been his department chairman and in whose room he once shared space. “I was so happy,” Edwards might retort, his face filled with glee, “that when Sidney Hook died his photo and obituary did not make page one of The New York Times!” Although the two shared many philosophic beliefs, Edwards was quick to go on record as to his heartfelt feelings: that a pretty girl should not be overlooked, or that public interest in Ayn Rand and R. D. Laing was fading in the 1990s, or that students were paying too much tuition and the faculty was receiving too little, or that the crooks in Washington should be thrown out, or that Nietzsche was not a true misogynist.
Edwards on Bertrand Russell
Edwards wrote about Bertrand Russell in a little-known article published in Lawrence C. Becker's and Charlotte B. Becker's Encyclopedia of Ethics (Routledge, 2001).
Writings
- "Bertrand Russell's Doubts About Induction" (1949)
- The Logic of Moral Discourse (1950-1951)
- "Hard and Soft Determinism" (1958)
- "The Cosmological Argument" (1959)
- Ethics and Language (1966)
- Ethics and Language (1966)
- "Atheism" (1967)
- Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 vols., 1967), editor-in-chief
- Buber and Buberism (1970)
- Heidegger on Death (1979)
- Ethics and Language (1966)
- Voltaire (1989)
- Immortality (1991)
- Heidegger's Confusions (2004)
- Reincarnation (2002)
- God and the Philosophers (2006)
Obituaries
The New York Times
'Paul Edwards, Professor and Editor of Philosophy, Dies at 81 December 16, 2004' By Jennifer Bayot
Paul Edwards, a professor of philosophy who edited The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, enduring and authoritative reference work covering topics from "the absolute" to Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion, died on Dec. 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.
The cause apparently was heart failure, said a friend, Aleksander Shlahet.
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published by Macmillan in 1967 and still in print, was written by more than 500 contributors, many of them prominent philosophers. It devotes eight volumes to nearly 1,500 theories, thinkers and ideologies of all eras and continents.
Professor Edwards, a longtime instructor at the New School and at Brooklyn College, wanted the encyclopedia to be comprehensive even at the risk of creating controversy. The entries related to existentialism, for example, "point out confusion and lack of clarity in some of the ideas," he told The New York Times upon the encyclopedia's publication.
A wry and caustic critic of religion, he wrote many of the entries on atheists. "It seems to be agreed that an atheist can be a good man, and that his oaths and promises are no less trustworthy than those of other people," Professor Edwards wrote.
In 1957, he edited a compilation of essays by Bertrand Russell, including Why I Am Not a Christian, which became the anthology's title. One of his own books, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996), criticized religious beliefs in rebirth.
"There is no God, there is no life after death, Jesus was a man, and, perhaps most important, the influence of religion is by and large bad," he wrote in the current issue of Free Inquiry, a magazine about secular humanism, a school of thought that emphasizes values based on experience rather than religion.
Professor Edwards was born to Jewish parents in Vienna on Sept. 2, 1923. His family immigrated to Australia during Hitler's rise to power, and he received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Melbourne. He later moved to Manhattan and, in 1951, received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia.
He taught at New York University in the 1960's, at Brooklyn College from 1966 to 1986, and at what is now the New School from the 1960's to the late 1990's.
Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus. God and Philosophers, also to be published by Prometheus, is a chronicle of various thinkers' approaches to the question of God.
No immediate family members survive.
The Bertrand Russell Society News, November 2004
Dr. Paul Edwards, editor of 'The Encyclopedia of Philosophy and honorary member of the Bertrand Russell Society, died in his Manhattan home early in the morning of December 9, 2004. He was 81 years old. With nearly 1,500 entries by over 500 contributors, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967 by Macmillan, is one of the monumental works of twentieth century philosophy. Published when analytic philosophy was at its peak, it exhibits all the robust muscularity of a great work created at the high point of a movement. Edwards’ editing, especially his famous intolerance of “confused thinking”, contributed much to the power of the work.
The greatness of the Encyclopedia became especially apparent after 1998, Routledge published its own Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The only good way to judge an encyclopedia or dictionary is by comparing its entries with those of a competitor. (Try this for yourself next time you go to Borders to buy a translating dictionary and you will see what I mean.) Though the Routledge Encyclopedia is a larger work (10 volumes instead of 8; 2000 entries instead of 1500) on which a great deal of money was spent, and though it sold at a magisterial price ($3,775.00), it soon became clear, after one compared a few dozen entries in the two encyclopedias, that despite all its efforts to replace Edwards’ Macmillan Encyclopedia, the Routledge Encyclopedia is an ordinary work and the Edwards’ Encyclopedia is not. The Routledge Encyclopedia simply had the effect of increasing the appreciation of Edwards’ Encyclopedia among philosophers.
Dr. Edwards was a critic of religion, and as well as editing the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he wrote several entries related to religion for it, including ‘Atheism’, ‘Atheismusstreit’, ‘Common Consent Arguments for the Existence of God’, ‘Why’, parts of the entry on Russell, and, most intriguingly, an entry entitled ‘My Death’. In that last essay, Edwards examined the common view that one cannot imagine or conceive of one’s own death though one can imagine and conceive of the death of others, and after careful analysis found the idea “confused” and wanting. He concluded:
- It seems quite plain that human beings not infrequently imagine and conceive of their own deaths without the least difficulty, as, for example, when they take out life insurance or when they admonish themselves to drive more carefully. Nor is it at all difficult to explain what a person imagines when he thinks of his own death. “When I die,” wrote Bertrand Russell in a famous passage (in What I Believe), “I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive”; and it is surely this that people wish to avoid or put off. A person thinking of his own death is thinking of the destruction or disintegration of his body and the cessation of his experiences.
As well as editing The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edwards was the author of several books, including Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, The Logic of Moral Discourse, Heidegger’s Confusions, and numerous articles. Additionally, he is responsible for having collected a number of Russell’s writings on religion and publishing them under the title Why I Am Not a Christian. In so doing, he changed the lives of thousands of people around the world, including the lives of many in the BRS.
Born in Vienna on September 2, 1923, to Jewish parents, Edwards’s family fled to Australia with Hitler’s rise to power. Edwards received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Melbourne, then moved to Manhattan and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in 1951. He was a professor at New York University in the 1960s and Brooklyn College from 1966 to 1986, and lecturer at the New School for Social Research from the 1960s to the late 1990s. He also taught at the University of Melbourne, Columbia University, City College of New York, and the University of California, Berkeley.
By Peter Singer
Written for an Australian newspaper
Edwards was born Paul Einstein in Vienna, in 1923, the youngest of three brothers. He distinguished himself early on as a gifted and keen student and was admitted to the Akademische Gymnasium, a prestigious high school that only accepted students who had passed a difficult entrance exam. Paul could not complete his schooling there, however. His family was of Jewish descent, and although neither they nor Paul himself were religious, when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, that made no difference.
Sensing the danger, the family sent Paul to stay with friends in Scotland. He went to school there and improved his English. The rest of his family immigrated to Melbourne, where they had a large number of long-established relatives. Paul joined them soon afterwards. In those pre-multiculturalist war years, it was considered a disadvantage to have a foreign, and particularly German-sounding, name, and the family changed their surname to Edwards. In Melbourne, Edwards attended Melbourne High School, matriculating as du of the school. He then went to the University of Melbourne, where he studied philosophy, doing a Bachelor of Arts and then a Master of Arts.
In 1947 he was awarded a Melbourne University scholarship to study in England, but he never got there. On his way he stopped in New York and was offered a lectureship at Columbia University. There he completed his doctorate. Apart from a brief period teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, he stayed in New York for the rest of his life. While writing his doctoral thesis, Edwards wrote to Bertrand Russell, perhaps the greatest British philosopher of the twentieth century, but then out of fashion, thanks to the vogue for Ludwig Wittgenstein's attempt to dissolve the traditional problems of philosophy by analyzing the way we use language. Edwards, however, preferred Russell's more direct approach, and also shared Russell's skepticism about religious belief. This led to a lasting friendship and a number of joint projects. Edwards edited and wrote an introduction to a very widely read collection of Russell's essays, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects.
Edwards wrote several books, but his greatest influence in shaping moral philosophy came from two works that he edited. The first, A Modern Introduction to Philosophy, co-edited with Arthur Pap, became a very widely used introductory text. Edwards's greatest achievement, however, was in editing The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Published in 1967, this eight-volume work was no mere description of everything that went under the name of philosophy. It was, rather, a kind of manifesto of Edwards's approach to philosophy. He was a fervent advocate of clarity and rigor in philosophical argument, and he made sure that those he invited to contribute to the Encyclopedia shared these values. Some philosophers with big reputations, Edwards thought, were talking nonsense disguised as profundity, and he was delighted to be able to puncture those reputations. Argument and wit were his weapons. The existentialists made excellent targets, Heidegger foremost among them, and the articles on them and their ideas still make entertaining reading.
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy is still in print, although in an edition revised by other editors. When I visited Edwards in his New York apartment three years ago, he was distressed that the revisions had diluted the philosophical message and had been too gentle on a lot of postmodernist thought.
In addition to his appointment at Columbia University, Edwards taught at New York University, at Brooklyn College, and the New School. He loved teaching and until two years ago, continued to advise post-graduate students and to take adult education classes. He never married, or had children, but by all accounts, was not short of female company.
He is survived by his sister-in-law, Susan, and his niece Robin, who live in Melbourne.
About
A commendably concise summary of Edwards’s viewpoint is “God and the Philosophers,” which he wrote as an entry for the Oxford Companion of Philosophy.
In 2009, a book with that title was published by Prometheus Books. Tim Madigan not only wrote the Introduction but also, when Edwards died, went to his Manhattan apartment and searched for the various chapters that were scattered all about his large place. He then edited the chapters that contain his take on numbers of philosophers, those he liked and those he didn't.
Once asked if Edwards ever had a dog, Madigan reported in the past he might have had. But so long as he had known him in New York City,
- I remember him often stopping to pet the most vicious-looking beasts, all of whom sensed his love and let him do so, whereas they surely would have ripped off my arm.
Edwards signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Death and Memorial
Following wishes written in his Last Will, friends scattered the ashes of Paul Edwards into the Hudson River near where he lived in Manhattan. Following is Smith's account of the 10 December 2005 event:
- In his will, Dr. Paul Edwards, who died of a heart failure on 9 Dec 2004, directed that there be no funeral nor formal memorial and that his cremains be thrown into the nearby Hudson River.
- Edwards was the internationally famous non-revelationist, non-theistic, pragmatist editor of the 8-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He wrote books about Voltaire, Buber and Heidegger. He wrote books about ethics, determinism, moral discourse, and reincarnation. He wrote the foreword to Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian. And he taught hundreds of students at Brooklyn College, Columbia, New School University, and New York University.
- Born Paul Eisenstein in Vienna in 1923, the youngest of three brothers, he was sent to Scotland at the time the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Meanwhile his parents, who were not religious but did not want to risk staying in Austria, moved with their family to Melbourne, Australia, changing their surname to Edwards. When Paul joined his parents, he attended the Melbourne High School, then studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Offered a teaching lectureship at Columbia University, he completed his doctorate and remained a New York resident for the remainder of his life.
- Upon his death, Alek Shlahet, a friend of his for five decades and who had keys to the Edwards apartment at the Apthorp, invited Timothy Madigan and Warren Allen Smith to help look for files of and the manuscript for God and the Philosophers. He also invited close friends Alexandre Pozdnyakov and Judy Antonelly to view the apartment. In one of dozens of boxes and containers, Madigan was able to locate files of and the computer disk for God and the Philosophers. Also, during the tour of the large apartment, Shlahet came across one of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulators. Edwards had been a patient of and long an admirer of Reich, phoning Reich's third wife, Ilse Ollendorff, for appointments. It was no secret that Edwards found Reich’s treatments more helpful than Freud’s. Madigan, Smith, and neighbors in the building had heard Edwards utter the “primal screams,” for which Reich was famous.
Alex, Alek, Tim, Warren, and part of Paul's orgone box
- A year and a day after the death, Mrs. Carmela Shlahet, Judy Antonelly,
- Mr. Alec Shlahet, Warren Allen Smith, Alex Pozdnyakov, and Nildania
- Perez (left to right in the photo) met at 68th Street and Riverside
- Boulevard pier and carried out Dr. Edwards's wishes.
- Photo by Ligardy Olivier Termonfils
Shlahet, who once taught at Rutgers, said, "Paul Edwards, a lifelong believer in the here and now, and nothing else, asked me to have his body cremated and his ashes scattered into the Hudson River so that they may 'flow back to the sea.' When the weather gets a little warmer some of his friends and colleagues will be notified and a convenient time will be agreed upon to gather on the bank of the Hudson River and say goodbye to our good friend, Paul."
It was a particularly cold day. The ashes were strewn, a dozen red roses were thrown into the river, and each commented as to how their lives had been enriched for having known Paul.
Two of the roses float upstream.
A view of the pier, looking westward to New Jersey
- Smith is pictured above, following Dr. Edwards's death, in one of his many book-filled rooms at the ornate Apthorp building on the corner of 79th Street and Broadway. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, grand-daughter of Robert Ingersoll, had followed Smith as President of the Humanist Society of New York, and Edwards had succeeded her.
- Photo by Peter Ross
- Madigan and Smith are shown with a part of Wilhelm's orgone box found in the Edwards apartment.
On the present page are the only two known extant photos of Dr. Edwards, one at the beginning and one below, taken without his permission by Smith during a class at New School University which he audited under a pseudonym, succeeding in Edwards's not remembering their past with secular humanist groups.
- Photo by Warren Allen Smith
{Kenneth Blackwell, Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Winter 1998-1999; HM2; HNS2; OCP}
Correspondence
Shown is a letter to Edwards and his response.]
