Background
Flower, Elizabeth Farquhar was born on October 31, 1914 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States.
philosopher of education historian ol philosophy
Flower, Elizabeth Farquhar was born on October 31, 1914 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States.
University of Pennsylvania.
Assistant, then Associate Professor of Philosophy, 1945-1976; Professor. 1976-1985: Professor Emeritus, 1985, University of Pennsylvania.
After obtaining a degree in chemistry Flower was attracted to philosophy by a seminar conducted by Edgar Singer in the philosophy of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Later, she was appointed, as ‘E. Flower’, to teach at Pennsylvania, at a time when women’s classes were segregated and female faculty still unimagined. It is not certain ‘whether the trustees were aware that they had appointed a woman or whether they were being socially farsighted'. Flower’s teaching was centred upon cooperative courses that joined the humanities and the sciences. Believing that the scientific was valueladen and the normative grounded in scientific understanding, she approached ethics in its tclation to psychology and social science, to education and law, and to the larger cultural context. Her ethics ‘preserved historical insights ••• at a time when American philosophers had largely abandoned historical perspectives’. Flower pioneered intellectual exchanges with Latin America and worked with the Organization of American States, producing a series of monographs tracing the history of philosophy in Mexico, Peru. Colombia and Chile. Out of these studies there emerged the monumental History of Philosophy in America (1977), which surveyed American philosophy from its earliest beginnings ln the colonies, through the ‘wasteland of academic philosophy' that prevailed in American universities for some 100 years, to the major figures and movements of contemporary America. It is for this study, outstanding in its field, that Flower is best known.