Philosophers reading (and being read in) WWI lit

Here's another philosopher who was a soldier in WWI: Etienne Gilson, who was taken prisoner early in the Battle of Verdun (in February, 1916). Earlier, while on leave from the front, Gilson managed to put together a journal publication.

It's interesting to see how many veterans were critical of the war memoirs and novels that started appearing in the 1920s (esp. in 1929). I've noted Luce's public criticism in a Belfast sermon, which seems to have been aimed chiefly at Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That. Graves' book also drew the ire of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who meticulously documented the book's inaccuracies in Sassoon's copy of it. 

Wittgenstein was mildly critical of R. C. Sherriff's play Journey's End (1928). According to M. O'C. Drury, Wittgenstein read the play in 1936. Drury quotes Wittgenstein as follows:

Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn't find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them. I couldn't understand the humour in Journey's End. But I wouldn't want to joke about a situation like that. (M. O'C. Drury, 'Conversations with Wittgenstein', Ch. VI in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981], p. 144)

An early WWI text (1919) was Arthur Graeme West's Diary of a Dead Officer. West was killed on the front in 1917. His diary was edited for publication by his friend, the pacifist and philosopher C. E. M. Joad. There are references to Bertrand Russell in West's Diary (pp. 50-57) . West had been reading Russell's 'A Free Man's Worship' and Justice in War Time. In West, one sees the full disenchantment that is dramatized in many WWI books -- initially a religious patriot who wanted to serve King and country, West became an atheist and seemed on the point of refusing to fight any longer when he was killed by a sniper.

Luce on the War

In the Irish Times newspaper,^{(Nov. 11, 1929, p. 4)} there's a report by an anonymous journalist about a sermon given by A. A. Luce in Belfast Cathedral (on the occasion of the dedication of a war memorial lectern). Luce is there said to have criticized  recent war novels, and 'one in particular', on the grounds that they 'made two grave errors -- they overstated the physical horrors of war, and they did less than justice to the morale of the soldier'. Luce chides one author (unnamed) for having 'compressed the suffering of the Army into the imaginary experience of his hero'. There follows this quotation from Luce's sermon:

In my judgment, to depict the soldier's life as intolerable horror is a propagandist attempt to intimidate the soldier's son. Another and more serious blot upon recent fiction is the attempt to blacken the soldier. To say that war does, and must, develop all the animal in man and leave other qualities undeveloped is a libel on the dead and the living. Could the golden record of 50 000 Irishmen dedicated that day speak with tongues, the war novel of 1929 would hide its head for shame. Men would say that their comrades fought a clean fight and fell honourably dead in honour's cause. War fiction would be soon forgotten, but war facts would speak to generations yet unborn.^{(Irish Times, Nov. 11, 1929, p. 4)}

No authors or novels are named in the report, but Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That was published in 1929, as was Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero. Outside the UK, both Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front appeared in 1929.

The claim that the novels overstated the physical horrors of the War reminds me of Wittgenstein's offhand remark to the effect that the War wasn't really as bad as people thought it was. (I can't locate a source that gives Wittgenstein's exact words.)

Update (Feb. 23): Shortly after Luce's death, there appeared in the Irish Times an item called 'Some Recollections of Arthur Luce'. ^{(July 2, 1977, p. 13)} The author, identified only by the initials T. C. K. M., attended some of Luce's classes before WWI and maintained an acquaintance with Luce throughout his long life. T. C. K. M. observes that when Luce returned to Dublin from the battle front for a week-long leave in 1916, it was apparent that 'the shock to all his cherished ideals was shattering'. The author does not elaborate on these ideals but had earlier characterized Luce as a conservative Victorian 'and a believer in the Empire'.

Based on this description, one would expect Luce to have shared (or at least been sympathetic to) the bitter disenchantment of Graves and the other novelists and poets whose youthful patriotism had been shattered by the War. However, T. C. K. M. says that after returning to the front, Luce suffered from shell-shock, which was followed by 'a period of over-tension, withdrawal, a hardening of his ideas and a tendency to push them to a logical but impractical extreme'. Again, T. C. K. M. does not say which ideas hardened, but the implication seems to be that Luce doubled down on his old, conservative ideals.

So, on the one hand, some veterans (like Graves) were led by their war experiences to abandon in disgust their earlier, more patriotic ideals while, on the other hand, some veterans (like Luce) became even more committed to those ideals. I wonder if, in addition to the consciously followed reasons for their ideals, veterans in this second group were influenced by a psychological tendency to cling more fervently to beliefs for which they felt they had paid a price. More generally, the more one has invested in something, the more reluctant one is to abandon it; and this remains the case when the 'something' consists of ideals and the 'investment' involves risking one's life.

Fragments on WWI and philosophers

1. In an earlier post, I mentioned a paper by Jack Reynolds about the impact on philosophy of WWI. It turns out that Reynolds' paper is on-line at Academia.

2. Among philosophical schools of thought, perhaps neo-Kantianism suffered the most as a result of WWI. Prominent neo-Kantians, such as Alois Riehl and Wilhelm Windelband, signed the infamous 'Manifesto of the Ninety-Three' (1914), in which professors defended Germany's war effort (inc. the invasion of Belgium). Eventually, approximately four thousand German academics endorsed the claims of the manifesto, including many more philosophers. I'm not aware of any neo-Kantians who opposed the War. This might be one reason why the neo-Kantians didn't appear in histories of analytic philosophy until recently: after the War, anglo-philosophers didn't want to read them.

3. To get a sense of how philosophers (and some religious thinkers) in the UK and its allied nations viewed the War during its early stages, look at volume 13 (Oct. 1914-July 1915) of the Hibbert Journal, which includes papers by Norman Kemp Smith, G. Dawes Hicks ('German Philosophy and the Present Crisis'), Henri Bergson, Evelyn Underhill, Count Hermann Keyserling, and E. F. Carritt. Nietzsche -- er, straw-Nietzsche -- takes a beating.

4. One of the most Hegelian British philosophers of that era was Sir James Black Baillie, who translated Hegel's Phenomenology. In A Hundred Years of British Philosophy ^{(1938, pp. 317-8)}, Rudolf Metz wrote that the War prompted Baillie to abandon idealism. Metz based this claim largely on Baillie's Studies in Human Nature. Recently, Peter Hoerres has repeated Metz's claim. ^{(Hoerres, 'Idealism as Transnational War Philosophy, 1914-1918', in Anglo-German Scholarly Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ellis and Kirchberger [Brill, 2014])} However, Metz's claim is disputed on p. 51 of the Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers.

More about Baillie: Too old to join the army in WWI, Baillie served in the Admiralty's Intelligence Division for a couple of years and also was on a London conscientious objector tribunal. After the War, Baillie held several administrative positions. He was a labour arbitrator and lawyer and was knighted in 1931. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 'Baillie is presented as Sir John Evans in Michael Innes's novel The Weight of the Evidence (1944).' For more about Baillie, see David Charlston's dissertation, Hegel's Phenomenology in Translation: A comparative analysis of translatorial hexis. ^{(2012, University of Manchester)}

5. In response to the vilification of German philosophy, J. H. Muirhead defended some German philosophers (esp. Hegel) in German Philosophy in Relation to the War.

6. Outside the UK, other philosophers who served on the WWI front lines include: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Tillich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Löwith, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Alfred Schutz, Michael Polanyi, Gaston Bachelard, André Maurois, Alexander Koyré, Alain.

Arthur Aston Luce, Berkeley scholar and WWI vet

One of the philosophers who fought in WWI was A. A. Luce (1882-1977). He lived for most of his life in Ireland, where he taught at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). Luce was born and raised in Gloucester, England, and served in the British forces in the War. He made his name in philosophy as a leading scholar of Bishop Berkeley's works. He not only interpreted but, also, endorsed Berkeley's idealism.

Here are some of the other main points of Luce's biography. He was ordained into the Anglican (Church of Ireland) clergy in 1908. In WWI, Luce could have served as a chaplain but elected, instead, to enlist as a soldier in the Royal Irish Rifles (1915-18). In a nine-page biography, Luce's son, J. V. Luce, wrote that his father 'saw nearly three years active service in France, rose to the rank of Captain, and won the MC [Military Cross] for his conduct during the battle of Passchendaele in August 1917'. ^{(J. V. Luce, 'Introduction: A Memoir of A. A. Luce', in Fishing and Thinking, A. A. Luce [Shrewsbury, England: Swan Hill Press, 1990])} Passchendaele (aka the 3rd Battle of Ypres) was among the most wretched engagements in the War. So, it is no surprise that Luce suffered from 'shell-shock' ^{(according to  R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb in their Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952: An Academic History [Cambridge University Press, 1982], p. 490)}. It appears that Luce was murdered in 1977. At least, he is said to have died 'a few days after being assaulted ... by a man who had an antipathy towards clergymen'. ^{(Diarmaid Ferriter, 'Luce, Arthur Aston' Dictionary of Irish Biography [Cambridge University Press and Royal Irish Academy, 2016])}

In the 1920s, Luce was Samuel Beckett's tutor. At TCD, a tutor's role in relation to an assigned student was advisory and not directed towards teaching. Other professors at TCD had much more influence on Beckett than Luce did (esp. Thomas Rudmose-Brown). Still, Beckett seems to have been an admirer of Berkeley, and when Beckett applied for a teaching post at the University of Cape Town in 1937, he named 'Captain the Reverend Arthur Aston Luce' as one of his three referees. ^{(Letters of Samuel Beckett, v. I: 1929-1940, ed. Fehsenfeld and Overbeck [Cambridge University Press 2009], p. 523, letter dated July 29, 1937)} Also, interpreters of Beckett's work have focused on its philosophical relevance, particularly in connection with the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Luce published a book on Bergson in 1922.

A revealing source with respect to Luce's character is the anonymously authored obituary in the Times (of London). ^{('Obituary: The Rev. A. A. Luce, Churchman and Philosopher' The Times, June 29, 1977, p. 18)} According to this obituary, Luce had a 'striking and perplexing personality'. ^(Ibid.) He was regarded by his peers at TCD as 'independent, sometimes to the point of perversity' and as a holder of 'unusual' opinions. ^(Ibid.) The obituarist conjectures that 'the strain of these years [1915-18] in the trenches left a deep mark on his opinions and his modes of thought.' ^(Ibid.) Luce 'was seldom on the side of the majority, and, with a courage that never failed him, fought stoutly for many unpopular and indeed outrageous opinions.' ^(Ibid.) He became TCD's Vice-Provost in 1949 but was 'forced' to retire from that position in 1952 (due allegedly to his inflexible resistance to change). Finally, the author attributes to Luce a complex personality, in which 'the Puritan, the man of the world, and the sequestered don, the cold disciplinarian and the courtly and thoughtful host, the reactionary authoritarian and the passionate lover of justice -- all these jostled one another in an unpredictable kaleidoscope.' ^(Ibid.)

I think that the anonymous obituarist might have been R. B. McDowell. McDowell co-authored a history of TCD that contains the following remark, which resembles the just-quoted passage:

Most men contain some qualities which seem inconsistent with each other, but in Luce the opposites were to be seen in conflict almost every day. The courteous host and the frosty disciplinarian; the conscientious and devoted servant of the College and the tenacious fighter for his rights and emoluments; the single-minded seeker after the truth and the master of a repartee based on unfair pseudo-logic; the stern moralist and the very unorthodox churchman; the man of the world and the ill-informed provincial; the stylist in words and the ignoramus in the sphere of fine arts -- what was one to make of such a mixture? ^{(R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952: An Academic History [Cambridge University Press, 1982], p. 490-491)}

McDowell, a historian, contributed the parts of the book that concerned the humanities.

Luce resembled another British philosopher and WWI vet, Mure, in having a reactionary streak (though Luce wasn't nearly as pure a reactionary as Mure seems to have been). Luce resembled Weldon in being a courageous man who had a volatile, unpredictable character and who seemed to enjoy shocking people with his statements.

Here's a clip in which McDowell and J. V. Luce are interviewed about TCD:

More about the War and British philosophy

Following my last post, my search for some discussion of WWI's impact on British analytic philosophy has borne fruit.

1. First, in a recent paper, Stewart Candlish asks, 'How do we account for the wider decline in allegiance to idealism?' ^{('Philosophy and the Tide of History: Bertrand Russell's Role in the Rise of Analytic Philosophy', The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy, ed. Erich H. Reck [Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], p. 55)} He ventures the hypothesis that idealism was a surrogate for traditional forms of religion, offering succour in the face of hard facts. Candlish adds that the ascendancy of Darwinian naturalism reduced the need for such 'consolation'. He then says,

Consolatory views began to look positively distasteful in the aftermath of the Great War. After all the mud, the gas, the relentless shelling, the blood and slaughter, idealism's central tenet of the spirituality of the universe was offensive when not merely laughable, particularly so when we remember its German origins. (Ibid.)

Candlish refers to Paul Fussell's study of the disillusioning impact of WWI, in the light of which the spiritual consolations afforded by idealism and religion alike were exposed to mockery.

Candlish offers these reflections as only a 'sketch of a partial answer'. ^(Ibid.) I have the following reservations. First, there are forms of idealism that don't offer consolation (e.g., Schopenhauer's version). Second, most of the British, WWI veterans whom I've identified maintained their commitment to idealist or to more traditionally religious frameworks after the War. Why say that the mud, gas, shelling, and so on militated against these outlooks when most of the UK philosophers who suffered these assaults first-hand were not thus disabused? Perhaps idealism was weakened not by the adversity, itself, but by the way the broader culture remembered and interpreted the adversity. Third (and in connection with those 'German origins'): absolute idealism took root and spread in early nineteenth-century Prussia, a culture that was not unfamiliar with the ravages of war.

2. In his The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy, Thomas L. Akehurst says that one effect of the War was to diminish the engagement of British philosophers with German philosophy. I haven't yet looked at Akehurst's book very closely, but he (among other things) examines the vilification of German philosophers (esp. Hegel) by L. T. Hobhouse and others in the wake of WWI, and Akehurst traces this trend in the works of various British philosophers.

3. Flipping through the 1914-19 volumes of Mind and the Aristotelian Society's Proceedings, I found relatively few references to the War. In the brief summaries of the Society's meetings, there are repeated expressions of concern about the increased cost of paper (due to the War) along with encouraging statements to the effect that the Society's membership continues to grow. In Volume 17 of the Proceedings (1916-17, pp. 256-99), there's a symposium on social reconstruction after the War. (The symposiasts were Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, George Bernard Shaw, C. Delisle Burns, and H. D. Oakley.)

In an issue of Mind, there's a short piece by one of the veterans, J. L. Stocks ('The Test of Experience', Mind 28 [1919]: 79-81). Stocks' topic is Aristotle's treatment of courage in connection with fear and 'cheer' (or confidence, to use the more common translation). Stocks says that before his own battlefield experiences, he shared in the widespread skepticism about Aristotle's talk of 'cheer'. However, adds Stock, after serving in the trenches and observing another soldier's behaviour, he now knows what Aristotle meant. Stocks writes of a kind of 'invigoration' and 'enjoyment' (p. 80) that he and his comrades sometimes felt in the heat of battle.

Unlike many (all?) of the other British philosophers who saw active duty in the War, Stocks had begun his professional academic career before the war began; he became a fellow and tutor at St. John's College (Oxford) in 1906. Stocks died on June 13, 1937 from complications of a war wound.

Analytic philosophy and World War I

I'm struck by the dearth of references to World War I in standard histories of analytic philosophy. I don't pretend to have done a comprehensive search, but the War doesn't figure prominently in many of the more well-known histories (e.g., those by Passmore, G. J. Warnock, and Soames). There have, of late, been publications that situate Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle within the broader cultural trends that followed the War, but I'm not aware of any work that performs a similar function in connection with the analytic philosophers of the UK.

The War is known to have had a tremendous cultural impact in the UK. Historians sometimes speak of the 'long 19th century' as ending only after 1918. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell traces a host of cultural trends to the War (esp. the increased use of irony). But in many histories of analytic philosophy, you get the impression that the British branch of this tradition was nurtured in an order of reasons well insulated from messy (or muddy) causes. It's mostly context of justification with little context of discovery (little, at least, that reaches beyond university campuses).

There must have been some interesting Great War impact (immediate or delayed) on the growth of analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein composed his Tractatus while he was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian forces and a prisoner of war. Russell lost his position at Cambridge due to his opposition to the War and jeopardized his own well-being via his run-ins with the law over the War's continuation. So, the War loomed large in the lives of two of the most influential, early analytic philosophers. There must be some publications about the War's impact on Wittgenstein's thinking. With regard to Russell, there's this bit by Father Copleston:

One effect of the First World War on Russell's mind was to turn it away from the idea of an eternal realm of abstract truth, where one can take refuge in the contemplation of timeless and non-human beauty, to concentration on the actual concrete world. And this meant, in part at least, a turning away from purely logical studies to the parts of psychology and linguistics which seemed to be relevant to epistemology. (History of Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, p. 438)

I have yet to chase down Copleston's references in this part of his book, so I don't know if the author is here paraphrasing Russell or giving his own interpretation of the war's effect.

In a retrospective paper, Gilbert Ryle wrote:

For the First World War had, between 1914 and 1918, virtually extinguished a whole generation. To the academic world as outside it, to the departments of philosophy as to those of other disciplines, there returned a bare handful of mediators between us, who in 1918 were too young for active military service, and the members of 'the old gang' who, in 1914, had been too old for it. ('Fifty Years of Philosophy and Philosophers', Philosophy 51 [1976]: 383)

Ryle characterizes the War's influence in negative terms as an absence, a missing generation.

Several British philosophers saw active duty in the British forces in WWI. Here are the ones whom I've so far found:

John David Mabbott (officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery; Oxford, President of St. John's College);
Henry Habberley Price (Royal Flying Corps; Oxford, Wykeham Professor at New College);
Geoffrey Reginald Gilchrist Mure (Warwicks Royal Horse Artillery; Oxford, Warden of Merton College, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford);
Thomas Dewar Weldon (Royal Field Artillery; Oxford, Magdalen College);
Charles Arthur Campbell (10th Borders Regiment; Glasgow, Dean of Faculties);
John Macmurray (Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders; University College, London (Dept. Head), Edinburgh);
Sir Walter Hamilton Moberly (Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry; Birmingham, Vice-Chancellor of the Manchester University);
John Leofric Stocks (King's Royal Rifle Corps; Oxford, Manchester, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool); and
Arthur Aston Luce (12th Royal Irish Rifles; Trinity College, Dublin, Vice-Provost).
(Added, Aug. 29, 2016: John Albert Chadwick)
(Added, Jan. 7, 2018: Leon Roth)
(Added, Feb. 3, 2018: Alexander Dunlop Lindsay)

Some reflections:

1. Only three of these philosophers were within the tradition of analytic philosophy (Price, Mabbott, and Weldon). Re. Price: while I think he was an analytic philosopher, he was out of sympathy with some of the main trends in that tradition. E.g., he addressed traditionally metaphysical topics.

2. Many on this list were very much engaged in metaphysics. Price wrote about God and the survival of death (and was President of the Society for Psychical Research [1939-41]). Campbell and Macmurray wrote about free will. Luce was a Berkleyan idealist, Mure an idealist of the Hegelian variety. Moberly was a devout Anglican who criticized retributivist models of punishment. Mabbott and Weldon, though not focused on metaphysics, wrote about topics that were seldom addressed by other analytic philosophers in their time; both published books on political philosophy, and Mabbott published on punishment (defending retributivism).

3. It's interesting that so many of these WWI veterans went on to hold high administrative positions in universities.

4. I'm looking through Mabbott's autobiography Oxford Memories, but his remarks there about the War seem largely confined to his own experience of it. However, in Chapter 10 of his book The State and the Citizen: An Introduction to Political Philosophy ('The State as a Centre of Sympathy and Co-operation'), Mabbott examines the extent to which the state can promote 'sympathy and willing co-operation'. ^{(The State and the Citizen [London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1948], p. 95)} He says that the 'ideals of service and fellowship ... seldom survive the early moments or the crisis of a war, before the inevitable disillusion sets in'. ^{(Ibid., p. 96)} He adds that in WWI, one sees how 'war brought out the worst everywhere, in the Church, the Press, the Government, the Army, how even where decency lurked, in the trenches for instance, it was a soured and acid decency, the dogged acceptance of necessary evil rather than the high heroism of the early days'. ^{(Ibid., pp. 96-7, footnotes omitted)} (In the omitted footnotes, Mabbott gives examples to illustrate his points about the Church and the Press.) It's interesting that Mabbott leaves academia out of his list of corrupted institutions. Also of note is that he quotes approvingly from C. E. Montague's Disenchantment in this part of his book.

5. There was at least one promising, young French philosopher who was killed in WWI (Pierre Rousselot), and at least two German philosophers were (Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach). (Indeed, it appears that whole discussion circles in Germany never recovered.) However, I'm not aware of any UK philosophers who were killed in the War. Were there any?

6. Perhaps a major, long-term consequence of the War was a turning away from comprehensive systems in favour of more piecemeal intellectual exercises -- more Cook Wilson and less Bradley. There was also more attention to concrete phenomena and a suspicion of abstraction.

Thomas Dewar ('Harry') Weldon

In WWII, philosopher T. D. Weldon was Sir Arthur ('Bomber') Harris' assistant in Bomber Command. He helped Harris formulate the arguments and draft the documents that would promote the program of area bombing. Weldon was also a philosophy tutor in Magdalen College at Oxford University.

My interest in Weldon was piqued by C. S. Lewis' description of him. Lewis and Weldon were colleagues at Magdalen. They seem not to have been fond of each other. Here's some of what Lewis has to say about Weldon:

...determined to be a villain. ... a frequent and loud laugher .... carries a great deal of liquor without being drunk. ... He is insolent by custom to servants and to old men .... He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He gives no quarter and would ask none. He believes that he has seen through everything and lives at rock bottom. ... Contempt is his ruling passion: courage his chief virtue. (Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991], pp. 482-3)

Lewis modeled a fictional character partly on Weldon in two scifi novels, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. The character in question is Dick Devine (aka Lord Feverstone), who is supposed to reflect Weldon's atheism and rationalism (in the loose and popular sense).

Before teaching at Oxford, Weldon served on the western front in WWI. He joined the Royal Field Artillery in France in 1915. From humble beginnings, Weldon was promoted to the rank of 'acting captain' ^{('Weldon, Thomas Dewar (1896–1958),' Mark J. Schofield in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Lawrence Goldman [Oxford: OUP, 2004[)}. He was wounded and awarded 'the Military Cross and bar' ^(Ibid.). According to R. W. Johnson, 'Those familiar with the mores of the British Army will recognize that this meant that he was quite insanely brave and clearly on the verge of a Victoria Cross' ^{(Johnson, 'Exploring the Secret Garden', chap. 4 in Look Back in Laughter: Oxford's Postwar Golden Age [Newbury, UK: Threshold Press, 2015])}

Weldon was a philosophy tutor at Magdalen College from 1922 until his death in 1958. He was known to have a good rapport with his students. According to the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was 'not only accessible but also hospitable to his students, rewarding their efforts with a glass of sherry or a tankard of beer.' ^{('Weldon', Schofield, ODNB)} (Weldon was a drinker. Another student, Robert Paul Wolff, recounts a discussion with a 'clearly inebriated' Weldon.) One of Weldon's more well known students was John ('Jack') Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden of the Wolfenden Report. Weldon was the godfather of Baron Wolfenden's son, the brilliant, tragic journalist and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. (Incidentally, in his biography of Wolfenden (the younger), Sebastian Faulks says that Weldon took the nickname 'Harry' from a 'music-hall comedian' ^{(Faulks, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives, [NY: Vintage, 2002], p. 212)}.)

In WWII,  Weldon worked in the civil service from 1939 until 1942, at which time he became Sir Arthur Harris' Personal Staff Officer at Bomber Command. ^{('Weldon', Schofield, ODNB)} Wing Commander Weldon was tasked with defending Bomber Harris' program of bombing German cities. The program had been challenged by a Cabinet Minister and Christian socialist, Sir Stafford Cripps. On Dec. 8, 1944, Cripps gave a lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, in which he condemned area bombing as a decidedly un-Christian thing to do. Harris wasn't there, but the officers who attended the lecture were quite put out. In response, Harris had Weldon give a lecture the following night in defense of area bombing. ^{(Jonathan Glover, Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 86)} In his lecture, 'The Ethics of Bombing', Weldon denied that area bombing was terrorism, arguing that its purpose was to save lives by shortening the war. (My information about Weldon's lecture is drawn from Glover's above-cited book and from David I. Hall, '“Black, White and Grey”: Wartime Arguments for and against the Strategic Bomber Offensive', Canadian Military History 7 [1998]: 7-19). Among Weldon's critics at the time was the Rev. John Collins, the Anglican chaplain at Bomber Command who referred to Weldon's talk as the 'bombing of ethics' (and who would later be instrumental in forming the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). (C. S. Lewis also was opposed to Harris' policy.)

It's odd that Weldon should have resorted to such a rationale, for he appears to have been a Kantian. A. J. Ayer characterized him as such. Actually, what Ayer says (in the course of explaining why neither he nor J. L. Austin won the John Locke Prize in 1933) is that Weldon was 'a Fellow of Magdalen, who was later to become an inflexible linguistic philosopher but was then an orthodox Kantian'. ^{(Ayer, Part of My Life [London: Collins, 1977], p. 152)} So, Weldon was an orthodox Kantian in 1933 but might not have been by the time WWII rolled around. Also, while Weldon was in some sense a Kantian, I don't know if he ever endorsed Kantian ethics.

There's a consensus among those who have written about him that Weldon was psychologically maimed by his battle-field experience in WWI. This comes through in C. S. Lewis' characterization of Weldon (as one who had the air of having 'seen through everything and [who] lived at rock bottom') as well as in a note about Weldon by a former student (Canadian-born Anthony King). R. W. Johnson says that Weldon 'was a man of steel who, in both wars, had had to face appalling situations and ultimate questions'. ^{(Johnson, Ibid)} Perhaps, then, Weldon's willingness to advocate area bombing was a case of brutalized (in WWI) and brutalizing (in WWII). Kantian and other alternatives to utilitarianism were fine for discussions at Magdalen College, but in the horrifying world of 20th-century warfare, it's massacre or be massacred.The anger, the drinking, talk of a suicide (though that's disputed)* -- today, Weldon would be in treatment for PTSD. In his day, he was wheeled out as a mouthpiece for the designers of terror bombing.

A few more notes about Weldon:

His Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ^{(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945)} was enlarged and republished 1958 under a shortened title (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason). R. G. Collingwood (for whom Weldon had been a teaching assistant) appears to have refereed the 1945 version of Weldon's Kant book -- at least, he expressed approval for the text in a letter that he wrote to Clarendon Press in 1939 (Nov. 17), where Collingwood wrote that the book 'tackles the subject in the one and only right way, i.e. as an historical subject'. ^{(R. G. Collingwood: A Research Companion, James Connelly, Peter Johnson, and Stephen Leach [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015], p. 90)}

Weldon was active in the administration of Magdalen. Margaret Simons reports that he 'was, according to his biographers, responsible not only for forming the Modern Greats curriculum, but also for transforming Magdalen from an easygoing place, in which wealth and family position were key selection criteria, to an academic meritocracy'.

On Weldon's death, Ayer says that Gilbert Ryle had intended to drive to Venice with 'his friend Harry Weldon' to attend the 12th International Congress of Philosophy in 1958, but Weldon died, and Ryle invited Ayer 'to take his [Weldon's] place'. ^{(Ayer, More of My Life [London: Collins, 1984], p. 157)}

*The official cause of death was a brain hemorrhage.

Links (mostly philosophy)

Rare policy statement: the most comprehensive roundup of philosophy links is the Daily Nous's 'Heap of Links'. In my philosophy link lists, I try to link to items that haven't yet been captured there.

Cass Sunstein uses the development of Star Wars to illustrate points about law and other narratives:

Narrative offers broad lessons not only for movies, but also for creativity of many different kinds, and in areas that include novels, poems, histories, music, and law. Those lessons involve, above all, the impossibility of planning (in literature or law), the eruptive nature of the creative imagination (in literature and law), and the (challenging but blessed) difficulty of achieving coherence.

Peter Singer on 'Effective Altruism'.

Gary Gutting on Michael Ruse's atheism book.

Robert Sapolsky on how language influences thought.

Open Culture gathers several of the Open University's philosophy cartoons, narrated by Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson.

David Byrne interviewed by Jules Evans on 'music, ecstasy and catharsis':

As ER Dodds pointed out in The Greeks and the Irrational, ecstatic cults (with drumming!) were always around…but when did they lose acceptance? With the triumph of the Enlightenment?... I began to sense that rhythmic and repetitive music could do something more that just be an outlet for my unspoken unheard self- it could gradually change that self….and it seemed to be most effective in music rooted in a something that had been repressed or cast aside by western culture.

Ether Wave Propaganda on Agassi, Feyerabend, and Lakatos.

Philosopher Irving Thalberg, Jr. with his Hollywood exec father (Irving, Sr.) and his mother, actress Norma Shearer:

Irving Thalberg, Sr., Jr., and Norma Shearer

Neuroskeptic applies Popperian theory to see if science is broken.

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter on teleology in nature and culture. 

Andrew Manns on Girolamo Cardano: 'Much like other creatives in history, such as Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, and Carl Jung, Cardano’s visions were coincidental with his mental exhaustion and anxiety.'

Danny Heitman on Montaigne, who '...Pioneered the Personal Essay and Made Candor Literary'.

A Five Books entry in which John Gray recommends books on utopia and apocalypse. 

The Taylor & Francis Philosophy Hall of Fame.

Melvyn Bragg interviews Peter Adamson, Carole Hillenbrand, and Robert Gleave about Al-Ghazali; in February, Bragg interviewed Richard Whatmore, Donald Winch, and Helen Paul about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here's a list of Bragg's recent BBC interviews.

Audio from Eugene Wigner's 1964 interview on the Manhattan Project. 

From the CBC Archives: A televised interview of Northrop Frye (1973).

Some Desert Island Discs (BBC) episodes: Ian Fleming ('All history is sex and violence'), Tennessee Williams, Roald Dahl, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Tariq Ali, Randy Newman, Zadie Smith, and Barbara Pym.

Max Black & George Grant in a 1960 TV show on CBC

What a find -- in CBC's archives for the show Fighting Words! The show's initial run was from 1953 till 1962. It had a 'talking heads' format -- the guests would discuss and debate a series of topics fielded by the host, Nathan Cohen. I've put below a clip from a 1960 episode featuring Cornell University philosopher Max Black, Canadian philosopher George Grant, actress Tony Robins, and newspaper editor Michael Barkway. The show has merits -- I haven't seen video footage of Black and Grant apart from this clip -- but it illustrates a weakness of many intellectual talk shows on TV in that the guests can seldom finish a thought before being cut off. Cohen, Barkway, and Black smoke throughout. The show's focus is on issues in what we would now call 'applied ethics'. The conversation about espionage (in the latter half of the clip) occasions some remarks on the state by Black and Grant. Max Black at 14.19: 'To apply moral terms to a state is to commit a mistake in logic'. Black seems to be denying the possibility of corporate agency.


Other episodes of this show featured Robertson Davies, Brendan Behan, J. B. Priestley, Morley Callaghan, and Norman Mailer.

Max Black completed his graduate work in philosophy under Susan Stebbing's supervision at the University of London. Probably the most well-known person whose graduate work was supervised by Black (at Cornell) is the novelist William H. Gass.

Black's family includes several accomplished academics. His daughter, Naomi Black, was a poli-sci professor at York University in Toronto, where she lived with her husband, S. P. Rosenbaum, a Bloomsbury scholar. One of Max Black's brothers was Sir Misha Black, a professor of industrial design in the UK. This bio of Sir Misha provides more information about Max Black's other two siblings (Sam and Betty).

Arthur Danto, 1929-2013

Arthur Danto's obituary and a reminiscence by one of his colleagues at The Nation.

Akeel Bilgrami remembers Danto:

Premonitions of that defection were there for us to see for some years before, when in his editorial judgements at the Journal of Philosophy and in his stray remarks he would betray a mild weariness with the way Philosophy had gone: the tedium of some of its professional protocols, the barbarous idiom of some of its writing, the lack of chivalry in some of its argumentative combat, and the routines of its reinvention of familiar and tired ideas.

Santiago Zabala on Danto:

Not only was Danto a leader within the academy as the author of classical studies on Nietzsche and aesthetics and as president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society of Aesthetics, but he was also among the most important art critics in the world. Since 1984 he was an art critic for The Nation and Artforum and received several international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990, the Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1996, and the French Prix de Philosophie in 2003.

Michael Kelly's interview of Danto in 2000 at BOMB Magazine.

Update (Nov. 4): Here's Leonard Schwartz's 1-hour interview with Danto from Feb., 2007.


s
Arthur Danto: 01/17/2006 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.

Links to scintillating excogitations, largely Wittgensteinian

Rose Rand, who was born in Lemberg and moved to Austria, where she was a member of the Vienna Circle, and fled to England in 1939 with Susan Stebbing's help.

From the BBC: Raymond Tallis and Ray Monk on Wittgenstein (it starts about 57 seconds into the audio file). From the BBC in 2003, Melvyn Bragg interviews Monk, Barry Smith, and Marie McGinn about Wittgenstein.

Arthur W. Collins reviews Paul Horwich's book Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy.

Andrew Lugg reviews Wittgenstein's Tractatus: History and Interpretation (ed. Sullivan & Potter).

Matthew Frost's notes on his continuing project of translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Duncan Richter's two posts about Tractarian elucidation.

Reshef Agam-Segal on 'thinking and willing subjects in the Tractatus'.

Philip Cartwright on propositional form.

From last March, Lars Hertzberg on talking (non)sense about nonsense (good comment thread), and a follow-up (with further interesting comments).

Duncan Richter's two posts about Wittgenstein on 'good'.

Gavin Kitching on Rupert Read's Wittgenstein Among the Sciences.

'Why on earth is it so difficult to describe the Contents of my Consciousness?'

A. C. Grayling on 'Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty'.

Henrik Lagerlund's 'Science and Reason', Part 1 ('Rationality of Modern Science') and Part 2 ('Pessimism and the Myth of Progress') -- lots on G. H. von Wright.

From Siris -- 'In Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy'.

Last May and June, SOH-Dan put up several posts on Dummett's Frege, McDowell on cog-sci, and Sebastian Rödl on Kant's first analogy.

MWQ quotes a lengthy passage from Steven Tester's new translation of Lichtenberg. The quoted passage focuses on Lichtenberg's philosophy of mind. Here's one of my favourite passages from Lichtenberg; it's about the mind-body relation and seems to anticipate Ryle's 'ghost in the machine':

Long before we could explain the common phenomena of the physical world we ventured to explain them through the agency of spirits. Now [that] we know better how they are linked together we explain one phenomenon by means of another; but we nonetheless have two spirits left to us, a god and a soul. The soul is thus even now, as it were, the ghost that haunts our body’s fragile frame. (G. C. Lichtenberg, c. 1776; trans. R. J. Hollingdale)

The Stanford Encyclopedia finally has entries for Moritz Schlick and Heinrich Rickert. Still no entries for Sir William Hamilton, Wilhelm Windelband (who influenced not only Rickert and Max Weber but also Samuel Beckett), Georg Simmel, Susan Stebbing, Friedrich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap (!), Ruth Barcan Marcus (!), William Dray, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley (though they're of course referred to in other entries). I don't mean this to be any strong criticism of the editors, who have likely already commissioned entries for many of the above-named figures. I know that the editors have launched an initiative to give more coverage to female philosophers.

Philosopher's Zone interviews Simon Blackburn about human nature; and Hubert Dreyfus and David Deutsch on AI. Here's Blackburn's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture (also available here).
 

May Sinclair, Novelist and Philosopher

May Sinclair

Late in April on the Pea Soup blog, there was a query about philosophy in novels. I discovered that one such book was by Mrs. Humphry Ward (aka Mary Augusta Ward). The book, which appeared in 1888, was called Robert Elsmere. It was a bestseller and was reviewed by Gladstone. The novel amounted to a popularization of T. H. Green's philosophy.

Around the same time that Ward was at work on this novel, another British, female novelist was developing her own interpretation of Green. May Sinclair (1863-1946) had begun reading philosophy before she entered Cheltenham Ladies' College, but it was during her time there under the tutelage of Dorothea Beale that she took up philosophy in earnest. Sinclair's first publication, on Descartes, appeared in the college's journal in 1882. She published her first book (of poetry) in 1886 under the pseudonym 'Julian Sinclair'. She was the first female member of the Aristotelian Society, joining in 1917. In 1923, Sinclair presented a paper to the Aristotelian Society. It was called 'Primary and Secondary Consciousness'. Among those who commented on her paper that evening were Alfred North Whitehead and our old friend C. E. M. Joad.

It was Dorothea Beale who encouraged Sinclair to read the works of T. H. Green, who was the subject of 'The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism', which Sinclair published in New World in 1893. Green confirmed Sinclair's interest in the German idealists, including Schopenhauer, whom she read avidly.

Sinclair published her first novel (Audrey Craven) in 1896. She had a blockbuster hit with Divine Fire (1904) (reviewed here), the popularity of which led to her tour of the United States in 1905. While in the USA, she met William James and visited President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.

Sinclair's intensive study of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann left her receptive to Freud's new science of the unconscious. She was among the first novelists to incorporate such themes in her fiction, and she helped to establish one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK (the Medico-Psychological Clinic) in 1913. According to Sinclair's entry in the Oxford DNB, she wrote the prospectus for the Clinic and was elected as one of its twelve founder members. She also sat on its Board of Management.

Sinclair is also known for being the first person to use William James' phrase 'stream of consciousness' in characterizing a work of fiction.

Her most highly regarded novel seems to be Mary Olivier. Here's a quotation from this work:

There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. --Mary Olivier, pp. 292-3; quoted from James Thrall, 'May Sinclair: Mystic Modern'.

While philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, literary scholars have. Some of them address the philosophical themes in her work. James Thrall, for example (in the above-linked work), focuses on Schopenhauer's influence. Christine Battersby, while acknowledging Schopenhauer's importance, argues that Spinoza is the philosopher whose thought is most evident in Sinclair's fiction. Two dissertations of interest in this connection are Leigh Wilson's 'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure and Justine McCarthy's Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.

Philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, but some have written about her. Bertrand Russell reviewed both of her books on idealism. He reviewed Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism in The Nation (August 31, 1918) and her The New Idealism in Nation and the Athenaeum (August 5, 1922). Both reviews appear in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914-1919.

It's unsurprising that Russell would be critical of books by an exponent of idealism, mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis. Still, he wrote to his mistress of the day, Lady Constance Malleson, that Sinclair's book 'was not very bad'. Russell took a generally respectful tone in both his reviews. He also corresponded with Sinclair about her defence of idealism.

Finally, we should admire Sinclair's courage in taking on Sir Almroth Wright, who had published an odious tract in which he opposed women's suffrage on supposedly scientific grounds. This prompted Sinclair not only to write a brief reply in the Times (of London) but also to produce a pamphlet called 'Feminism'. The details of this conflict are recounted by Jim Gough in 'May Sinclair: Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement'. Sinclair was a member of both the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Women's Freedom League.

Sinclair's obituary in the Times (Nov. 15, 1946) appeared, suitably, under the heading 'Philosophy and the Novel'.
 

City of Lions -- Lemberg, Lwów, and Lviv

Akademicki Square, Lemberg

(Source)
The western Ukrainian city of Lviv has an impressive and complex legacy. It began the 20th-Century as Lemberg, an Austro-Hungarian outpost in the eastern reaches of the Habsburg domains. Between the world wars it was Lwów, a city in the southeastern corner of Poland. After WWII it was Lvov near the western frontier of the Soviet Union. Since 1991, it has been Lviv near the western edge of Ukraine.

Ethnic diversity was long a hallmark of the city. By the middle of the 1500's, five ethnic groups each accounted for at least 5% of Lviv's population. These groups were Polish, Ruthenian (western Ukrainian), German, Jewish, and Armenian. [Source: 'Lviv: a Multicultural City Through the Centuries' [pdf] by Yaroslav Hrytsak.] The city's environs included many Ruthenian, Jewish, and German (inc. Mennonite) villages. Here are several old maps of the city.

In its Habsburg days, Lemberg took shape as a 'little Vienna'. It was the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian crownland called (rather grandly) the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As a provincial capital, Lemberg became a home for some lesser members of the Habsburg bureaucracy. For instance, Arthur Edler von Mises, an official in the Austrian state railway, spent part of his professional life in Lemberg. Both his famous sons, Ludwig and  Richard, were born there. So was Alexius von Meinong, whose father was a major general in the army. And then there's Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, born in Lemberg in 1836. His father was the chief of police.

Like the Viennese, the residents of Lemberg (Leopolitans) invested much in their university, a respectable, primarily undergraduate school and 'feeder' to the graduate and professional programs in Vienna. Lemberg University, which became Jan Kazimierz University in the interwar years, was the initial home of the Lwow/Warsaw School of logicians and philosophers. The members of this school who spent the most time in Lwów between the wars were Kazimierz Twardowski and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Other members of the school were there in their student days. That includes Jan Łukasiewicz, who was born and habilitated in Lemberg (his father was an army captain).

Łukasiewicz worked with the Lvov mathematicians, an impressive group whose members were based at the city's main university and at the local polytechnic. These mathematicians followed the Viennese habit of working and socializing at a café. Their favourite hangout was the Scottish café (in Akademicki Square), where they would write their mathematical problems and solutions on the marble tables. Here's a nice description of them and their café. Among the mathematicians in question were Stefan Banach, Wladyslaw Orlicz, and the Lemberg natives Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Mazur.

The Scottish Café (Szkocka Café)

The medical sciences were also well represented at Jan Kazimierz University. Researchers there included Jakub Parnas, Rudolf Weigl, Boleslaw Popielski, and Ludwig Fleck. The last two were born in Lemberg. Also, the first female physician in Austria-Hungary had her practice in Lviv (though she trained in Zurich).

Other distinguished mathematicians, scientists and engineers who hailed from Lemberg were Andrzej Mostowski, Alfred James Lotka, Stefan Bryla, and Maurice Goldhaber.

Lviv natives who distinguished themselves outside the mathematical and physical sciences include Solomon Buber (whose grandson Martin spent ten years of his childhood in Lemberg), Nahum Glatzer, Leopold Staff, Stanislaw Lem, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski (one of whose poems is 'To Go to Lvov'), Ivan Franko, and Józef Wittlin (whose 1946 memoir of life in Lvov has been translated into German and Spanish but not English).

While the Ruthenians tended to live in the rural areas around the city, there were several Ruthenian Leopolitans besides Ivan Franko who distinguished themselves in the literary and other arts: Vasyl Shchurat, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Ivan Trush, Stanyslav Lyudkevych, and the opera divas Olena Kulchytska and Solomiya Krushelnitska. Finally, there's Lubka Kolessa, an excellent Ukrainian pianist who emigrated to Canada.

A diverse university town with flourishing arts and sciences, philosophy and opera -- Lviv was a very civilized little city. But here civilization met the depths of savagery. As James Meek has said, 'Few places have been the nexus of as much evil as Lviv station.' Lviv lay in the bloodlands. It experienced the Holocaust and was only a little to the west of where the Holodmor occurred in the early 1930's. (It is alleged that a 'lesser known chapter of the Holodmor' happened in Lviv in the late 1940's).

But violence descended on Lemberg before the horrors of the 1930's and 40's. In the roughly twenty-five years following 1913, there were at least four battles named after the city. There were several battles in Lemberg's environs in 1914, when the Russians took the city, followed by the Battle of Lemberg (1915), when the Austro-Hungarians and Germans took it back.

Russian POW's in Lemberg (1915)

Bavarian King enters Lemberg with victorious troops (1915)

The end of WWI brought only more violence. Amid the collapse of the Habsburg order there was a pogrom near the end of 1918, which happened during the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-19), which featured another Battle of Lemberg (1918). Then there was the Polish-Soviet War, which included a Battle of Lwów (1920). There was another Battle of Lwów (1939), after which the Soviets took possession of Lvov. The NKVD jailed their Ruthenian political opponents and murdered many of them before evacuating in the face of the German invasion in June, 1941. There were pogroms in 1941 and an uprising against the Germans in 1944.

Jan Kazimierz University and the nearby polytechnic were targets of the violence. In July, 1941, twenty-five Lviv professors were murdered in the Wulka hills by the Nazis. The victims included the mathematicians Stanisław Ruziewicz, Kazimierz Bartel, Antoni Łomnicki and Włodzimierz Stożek (whose two sons were also among the victims). The law professor Roman Longchamps de Bérier, who had been the rector of the university, was killed with his three sons. A descendant of another victim, the economist Henryk Korowicz, has a post about the massacre (at which I found the Nazi newsreel posted below). Later in the war, the following Lvov mathematicians were killed by the Germans: Juliusz Pawel Schauder, Herman (aka Henryk) Auerbach, Moses Jacob, Stanislaw Saks, and Max Eidelheit (who is listed among the casualties in Ingarden's memorial to Schauder).

Another mathematician, Stefan Kaczmarz, was killed by the Soviets. So, too, was Stanisław Głąbiński, a Polish government official who had earlier been the rector and dean of the law school. He was killed in 1941 by the NKVD in Lubyanka Prison. 

Before WWII, Lwów's population included 150 000 Poles, almost 110 000 Jews, and 80 000 Ruthenians. Only a few hundred Jews remained in Lvov at the end of the war. During and after the war, the Soviets deported the Poles westwards across the new Polish-Soviet border. As a result, by 1947, the city had lost more than two-thirds of its pre-WWII population.

To quote from a New York Times article that was written during the Soviet occupation in 1939, 'Lemberg is a symbol of what is happening because it stood so long as an outpost of the eastward push of western civilization and now becomes a sign of a push in the opposite direction.' ['Break-up of eastern Europe is symbolized in Lwow' by Anne O'Hare McCormick (Sept. 25, 1939).] The Times reporter here presents a trope that had been given life by Poles and other westerners, who saw Lemberg not simply as a frontier town between countries or kingdoms or even empires but, rather, as a town on a fault line between civilizations. (The trope had been promoted especially by Soma Morgenstern, an accomplished author who lived in Lemberg before WWI.)

After WWII, many of the deported Poles moved to Wroclaw. They were followed in 1956 by Lwów's monument to the Polish poet Aleksander Fredro. In his book Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions, Gregor Thum describes the transfer of the Fredro memorial (p.298). It used to stand opposite the Scottish café. In fact, the picture at the top of this post is from the perspective of someone standing in front of Fredro's statue. The statue was replaced in Lviv by a statue of the Ukrainian hero Mykhaylo Hrushevskyi. Fredro's statue was moved from Lwów (now Lviv) to Breslau (now Wroclaw), where it found a new home on a site that had previously been occupied by an equestrian statue of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. The re-named cities incorporated new memorials, though none of the memories or identities were really new; they were just shifted or transposed according to Stalin's wishes.

One of the strengths of the law department at Jan Kazimierz University was international law. Philippe Sands wrote a paper about some of the more accomplished alumni of that law program. The alumni include Louis B. Sohn, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, and Raphael Lemkin. The last two made important contributions to the Nuremberg War Trials as well as to the UN's Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Along with them, the Leopolitans Simon Wiesenthal and Philip Friedman also survived the savagery that erupted in Lviv. They, too, worked for truth and justice, ensuring that civilization would have the last word.