Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was a German-born American philosopher and historian. He served as a Professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University from 1910 to 1938.
Background
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born on October 10, 1873 in Berlin, Germany, the son of Wallace William Lovejoy, a medical student from Boston, and Sara Agnes Oncken. He was christened Arthur Schauffler Lovejoy, but later changed his middle name to Oncken, in memory of his mother. The family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1874, after Wallace Lovejoy completed his medical studies. In April 1875, Sara Lovejoy died of an accidental self-administered overdose of drugs, and her husband subsequently left medicine for the Protestant Episcopal ministry. Following his marriage to Emmeline Dunton in 1881, he moved his family to Ohio, to New Jersey, and then to Germantown, Pennsylvania.
Education
Young Lovejoy graduated from the Germantown Academy in 1891. That year the Lovejoys moved to Oakland, California, and he entered the University of California at Berkeley. From the time he took his first philosophy course from George Holmes Howison at Berkeley (1894), philosophy became the focus of his academic career. Lovejoy received the Bachelor of Arts from the University of California in 1895. With his father's reluctant approval, he then entered the Harvard Graduate School, where Josiah Royce and William James were the major influences on his development as a philosopher. He valued Royce's "subtlety, flexibility, open-mindedness, " but became increasingly dissatisfied with his absolute idealism. Lovejoy doubted that any absolute could contain all the diversity and development of the actual world. His initial view of James was less favorable, for he considered him "rather disappointing" as a teacher. After leaving Harvard, however, Lovejoy drew from James many of the ideas on time, development, and pluralism central to his own philosophy. In 1897 Lovejoy received the Master of Arts and in 1898-1899 he studied comparative religions at the Sorbonne. He never completed the Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Career
Lovejoy began teaching philosophy at Stanford University in 1899. In 1900-1901 he became involved in the controversy surrounding the dismissal of the economist and sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross. Convinced that academic freedom had been denied Ross, Lovejoy submitted his resignation. In the decade after leaving Stanford, Lovejoy taught at Washington University, St. Louis (1901 - 1907), Columbia University (1907 - 1908), the University of Missouri at Columbia (1908 - 1910), and finally Johns Hopkins University, where he remained from 1910 until his retirement in 1938.
Although philosophy provided an intellectual alternative to religion, he agreed with his father's injunctions to serve Christ through social service. He helped establish a settlement house in Oakland, beginning an association with the settlement movement that would last for twenty years. In 1900s Lovejoy was deeply involved in settlement work, which he now saw as a "mission of the trained to the untrained. " Christian service had, by 1910, become part of the progressive effort to employ the knowledge of the universities in the service of society.
Lovejoy published widely in the history of ideas and in philosophy. Attracted to the history of religious thought, he concentrated on the introduction of ideas about time and development into Judeo-Christian thinking. His studies of European ideas led to his discovery of the long history of evolutionary thought before Charles Darwin. In philosophy Lovejoy was a sharp critic of the pragmatic philosophies of William James and John Dewey. His criticism and his method of careful discrimination of closely related ideas is best exemplified in "The Thirteen Pragmatisms" (Journal of Philosophy, 1908). He also continued his attack on philosophies of the absolute by concluding, in 1909, that the eternal was obsolescent.
Following his appointment at Johns Hopkins, Lovejoy devoted more time to research and writing and to his activities in the academic profession, and less to social service. He was the first secretary of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and was its president in 1919. He wrote much of the AAUP's first report on academic freedom and tenure in 1915, and investigated several early cases of alleged infringement of academic freedom. Lovejoy quickly concluded that Germany threatened American freedom in World War I. As early as 1914 he warned of the German danger in numerous essays. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Lovejoy enthusiastically worked with both the War Department and with private organizations, such as the National Security League and the YMCA. Although sensitive to the misuse of scholarship in war, he nonetheless lent his support to several dubious activities, including the writing of propaganda tracts for the National Security League and the Maryland Council of Defense, designed to sell the war and to rouse hatred of the enemy.
The 1920's was a decade of scholarship in history and philosophy that led to the publication of Lovejoy's major works, The Revolt Against Dualism (1930) and The Great Chain of Being (1936). The Revolt Against Dualism, originally given as the Carus lectures of the APA in 1928, was Lovejoy's defense of epistemological and psychophysical dualism against a variety of monisms. His dualistic views came under attack in the early twentieth century from pragmatists such as John Dewey, the new realists, and others. Lovejoy repeatedly defended dualism against these philosophers, who held that knowledge can be direct or that the world is made of one kind of substance. In the history of ideas Lovejoy concentrated on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought, especially ideas about evolution, human nature, and the work of the Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers. This work culminated in 1933 in the William James lectures at Harvard, published as The Great Chain of Being.
Lovejoy discovered three seminal ideas that had provided much of the framework of Western thought since Plato, the ideas of plenitude, continuity, and gradation. By the eighteenth century these ideas had coalesced into the idea of the Great Chain of Being, a chain stretching from God to the lowest creature, in which all the links must be realized and which was characterized by minute gradations between the links. The chain of being at its most grandiose implied a static conception of the universe, but new discoveries in biology and paleontology in the eighteenth century undermined its permanent and absolute character. By the early nineteenth century, ideas of development and evolution began to replace the chain of being with the idea of becoming. The moral implication of this echoed Lovejoy's early work; the absolute was obsolescent and the world was developing and evolving. The Great Chain of Being clearly exemplified Lovejoy's method of tracing the biography of a "unit-idea, " a seminal idea in the history of thought.
Lovejoy turned again to public affairs in the 1930's. In 1933 he warned Americans of the danger Hitler posed to world freedom. After retiring from Johns Hopkins in 1938, he became involved in several organizations--the Maryland Committee for Concerted Peace Efforts, the Maryland Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, and the Maryland Chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies--opposed to fascist aggression and favoring American aid to the Allies after the outbreak of war in 1939.
During World War II, Lovejoy worked with organizations such as the American Historical Association to foster discussion and rational consideration of political and foreign policy issues. He served on the University of Maryland Board of Regents from 1951 to 1955. Lovejoy continued his scholarship into his eighth decade. He revised two lecture series that were published as The Reason, the Understanding and Time (1961) and Reflections on Human Nature (1961). In the latter he traced eighteenth-century ideas about human nature and set forth his own ideas on human nature and ethics. He argued that the desire to be praised, the desire for self-esteem, motivated behavior, and he proposed to employ this desire to motivate ethical behavior. Lovejoy pursued his studies even after his sight failed in the late 1950's.
Politics
Lovejoy supported the national efforts to keep Communists from teaching on university faculties, believing that they endangered academic freedom.
Views
Lovejoy believed academic freedom must be maintained to preserve "the dignity of the teacher's profession [and] the leadership and social usefulness of the universities. " He believed that philosophers should contribute to the settlement of vital issues in human thought by making philosophy more scientific and by developing habits of cooperation to settle philosophic controversies rationally and conclusively.
He believed that we lack the capacity for direct knowledge of the world and, hence, that all knowledge is indirect. Indirect knowledge is possible, for ideas mediate between the object as it exists and the perception of the object. Lovejoy also defended psychophysical dualism, which maintained that the world is made up of both material objects and minds, and that neither is to be viewed merely as a manifestation of the other. When this was linked with epistemological dualism, Lovejoy had a coherent account of the universe.
Quotations:
"In studying philosophy a man is not committed to any particular view whatever, beyond a desire for reasonableness and an interest in the history of thought. "
"More philosophically-minded critics regarded Einstein's argument for relativity as little more than a logical bait-and-switch ploy: "[T]he supposition of most expounders of the Special Theory, that Einstein has proved the relativity of simultaneity in general - or that his 'simultaneity' is something more than a logical artefact - must manifestly be given up. "
"Next to the word 'Nature, ' 'the Great Chain of Being' was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word 'evolution' in the late nineteenth. "
Membership
Lovejoy was elected president of the American Philosophical Association (APA) in 1916.
