DR. PAUL EDWARDS – MEMORIAL 10 DECEMBER 2005

By Warren Allen Smith

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.

Upon his death, Alek Shlahet, a close friend of his for five decades and who had keys to the Edwards apartment, 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. 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

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."

A year and a day after the death, Mrs. Carmela Shlahet, Judy Antonelly, Mr. Shlahet, Smith, Alex Pozdnyakov, and Nildania Perez (left to right in the photo) met at 68^th Street and Riverside Boulevard pier and carried out Dr. Edwards's wishes.

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. (Photos by Ligardy Termonfils).

Two of the roses float upstream.                                                                 A view of the pier, looking westward to New Jersey.

On the left in a February 2005 photo, Smith is pictured in one of Dr. Edwards's many book-filled rooms at the Apthorpe ornate building on the corner of 79^th 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. On the right, Madigan and Smith are shown with a part of Wilhelm's orgone box found in the Edwards apartment.

Following are the only two known extant photos of Dr. Edwards, 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.

The best biographical material I have come across is the following, written by philosopher Peter Singer for Australian newspapers:

Paul Edwards, an influential philosopher who completed his education in Melbourne, died on December 9th (2004) in New York at the age of 81. Edwards was born Paul Eisenstein 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.

Meanwhile 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 dux 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 scepticism 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 Encycopedia 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.