Philip Ebersole

From Philosopedia

Philip Ebersole (14 December 1936 - )

Ebersole was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, the son of Donald Snyder Ebersole and Ida Louise Doub Ebersole. His mother was a school teacher. His dad worked at various jobs, including school teacher, barber, vacuum cleaner salesman, and a worker in the personnel department of Fairchild Aircraft. After World War II, he joined the Maryland civil service, retiring as a Maryland field supervisor for the Maryland State Employment Service. Both parents are deceased.

His brother, David Snyder Ebersole, lives in Yuba City, California, with his wife Sandra Montana Ebersole. He is a career Air Force officer who retired with the rank of colonel. Later he had a financial consultant business, then worked with the Department of Homeland Security at the Sacramento Airport. They have a daughter, Heather, who is married and a full-time wife and mother, and a son, Russell, who is on active duty in the U.S. Navy.

Ebersole was married in 1977 and divorced in 1987.

He grew up in Williamsport, Maryland, a town of about 2,000 population on the Potomac River in the foothills of the Appalachians. It is in the same county as the Antietam Battlefield. He attended Williamsport public schools. He won a Ford Foundation Pre-Induction Scholarship which enabled him to leave high school after the 10th grade and enroll at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1956 with a major in American history.

He served for two years in the U.S. Army as a volunteer - the first year at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and the second year with a detachment at Pepperell Air Force Base in St. John's, Newfoundland.

In college, he worked on The Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper, becoming associate editor in his senior year. In 1958, after being discharged from active duty, he joined The Daily Mail in Hagerstown, Maryland. He worked there through 1974, mostly as a reporter and, during his last year, as city editor.

Deciding that he was not cut out to be a supervisor of other people, Ebersole joined the Democrat and Chronicle, the morning newspaper in Rochester. He was a copy editor there through 1978 and a business reporter from 1978 through 1998. From 1980 to 1992, his main duty was to cover Eastman Kodak Co.

In 1959, Ebersole joined a Unitarian fellowship in Hagerstown, holding a number of positions in the congregation, including president of the congregation, religious education chair, and program committee chair. The fellowship, which was founded in 1957, has become the Unitarian Universalist Church of Hagerstown and now has its own building and minister.

In 1974, upon moving to Rochester, Ebersole started attending First Unitarian Church, then switched to First Universalist Church around 1980. He has managed the First Universalist library and bookstore since 1981 and led a "drop-in discussion" group since 2001. He also has been a member of the board of trustees and adult religious education chair of First Universalist. Since 2006 he has shared responsibility for the library and bookstore with a committee, and for the drop-in discussion group with a co-facilitator David Damico.

"The Unitarians were originally heretical Christians who believed that Jesus was a great and wise teacher but not the Son of God, and the Universalists were originally heretical Christians who denied that any human being would spend eternity in Hell. The two denominations merged in 1961," he told a reporter. "What was noteworthy," he continued, "is that neither denomination imposed a creedal test for membership. Over the years it was determined that you didn't have to believe literally in the Bible to be a Unitarian or Universalist, you didn't have to be a Christian, and you didn't even have to profess belief in God. Consequently freethinkers, humanists and rationalists found a home in the Unitarian Universalist Association. Not all Unitarian Universalists are humanists. My guess is that there are more humanists in the UUA than are affiliated with the Council for Secular Humanism."

"I was brought up in the Disciples of Christ denomination ("No book but the Bible, no creed but Christ") and baptized in my early teens. Soon after that," he told an interviewer, "I began to develop religious doubts. Since my college years, during which I first read the works of Bertrand Russell, I changed from being an agnostic who was almost a theist to an agnostic who for all practical purposes am an atheist. While not believing in a Heavenly Father who was personally concerned with him, I felt at one time that scientific materialism was inadequate to explain human life and consciousness. Since reading the works of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett on Darwinism, I think that maybe scientific materialism is a sufficient explanation after all."

Late in 2001, by chance Ebersole came across a leaflet for the Greater Rochester Russell Setand started attending their meetings. He now is the moderator at most of the Russell Set meetings and shares with Tim Madigan the responsibility for organizing the program. He joined the Bertrand Russell Society in 2002 and was elected to the board of directors in 2006.

Currently, Ebersole takes part in a number of other literary-philosophical groups, which he says he thinks of as part of the David White network. He is part of a reading group led by Alfred Geier, professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Rochester, which has spent a couple of years each reading Dante's Divine Comedy, Homer's Odyssey, and Milton's Paradise Lost. He takes part in a John Dewey seminar held by retired Kodak chemist Paul Mitacek at Mitacek's home. He is a member of the local chapter of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. During July and August, he takes a vacation from First Universalist and participates in David White's Christian Pathways and English-Speaking Union reading groups at St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

Ebersole's oldest friend in Rochester is Alden Thomas Poehner, a software engineer. Whenever the two met, Alden would ask what he had been reading lately. Several years ago he started to e-mail Alden monthly book notes. After a while he started adding other friends little by little to his e-mail list. Currently the notes go to 31 people besides Poehner.

Unmarried and without children, Ebersole lives in Rochester, New York.

(See reviews by Ebersole of books about John Dewey.)

(Also, see his blog and various other of his book reviews).

{WASM}