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Paul Edwards (September 2 1923-December 9 2004) was an American moral philosopher.

His Life

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

Peter Singer, in an obituary for an Australian newspaper, wrote the following:

• 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. 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.

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.

A year and a day after the death, friends Mrs. Carmela Shlahet, Judy Antonelly, Alek Shlahet, Warren Allen Smith, Alex Pozdnyakov, Nildania Perez met in New York City at 68th Street and Riverside Boulevard pier and carried out Dr. Edwards's wishes by throwing his cremains into the Hudson River.

Writings

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 vols., 1967), editor-in-chief
• The Logic of Moral Discourse (1955)
• Ethics and Language (1966)
• Buber and Buberism (1970)
• Heidegger on Death (1979)
• Voltaire (1989)
• Immortality (1992)
• "Bertrand Russell's Doubts About Induction" (1949)
• "Hard and Soft Determinism" (1958)
• "The Cosmological Argument" (1959)
• "Atheism" (1967)
• "The Case Against Reincarnation" (1986-87)
• "Heidegger's Quest for Being" (1989)

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