50th Reunion - Schilpp - for publicationhtmlAt the reunion of the Northwestern University class of 1955, held June 18, 2005 at Michigan Shores Club in Wilmette, amid the nostalgia for the good times 50 years ago, there were testimonies to the influence of a number of professors upon our lives. It was these influences that were most significant in what we took away from Northwestern and helped form whom we have become. Here is one -- My most memorable professor was Paul Arthur Schilpp . . . Edgar L. Hiestand Jr. LA 1955 "To all who dare to face the facts, however dark, who yet dare maintain faith in God and in their Fellowmen and who in this faith will not cease to think, speak, and labor for a better humanity." -P.A.S. In the summer of 1951 my church youth group was driving to the beach. Amid the giggling was a girl absorbed in a book. I asked her the subject, and she replied "PHILOSOPHY." "What's that," I said. She said, "the love of wisdom, the meaning of everything." So a month later--- ….In the front of a room in Harris Hall was a 50ish man with a mustache and graying crew cut. He introduced himself as [GERMAN ACCENT] " Paul Schilpp - S-C-H-I-L-P-P. Schilpp not Schlip - there is many a schlip between the cup and the lip." I soaked up Schilppisms. We experienced iconoclasm from this sometime fundamentalist German Methodist clergyman, turned Unitarian, pacifist, socialist, one worlder. He shared skeptical asides about the virgin birth, or radical political views that had gotten him fired from his first two college posts. Dr. Schilpp wore the mantle of LIBERAL proudly. After a discussion about socialism in one of his Friday night meetings with students in University Apartments, I tried to sign up. He said "NO," basically telling me I was too ingenuous to know the consequences of my impetuousness. How often repeated are false charges since against Socrates corrupting Athenian youths, and how difficult for 18 year olds making today's life choices. In Philosophy 101, I internalized his dictum that all philosophical questions are epitomized in the issue of THE ONE AND THE MANY. Whether about metaphors, about God, or about e pluribus unum, One & Many always defines THE QUESTION for me. In contrast to professional philosophers bogged down in semantics, Schilpp advocated an approach closer to the description of that youth group girl--A love of wisdom that helps one be a better human being, making a better world. This was the motive behind his editing the landmark series The Library of Living Philosophers. He applied the ancient goal -- know thyself -- to the future. My wife, Nancy, and I visited his home at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale when he was almost age 95. He had written in his Reminiscences that he did not delve into genealogy because, [ACCENT] "I am interested in where I am going, not where I came from." 50 years ago he said something at the end of a course that has often arrested me in the ensuing years. He said, [ACCENT] "You are all idealists now, your minds questioning, your intentions noble. But most of you will change. You will compromise and conform . . . but some won't . . .." So his words echo to us - a golden reunion group, with a lot of life lived, lots of memories, and lots of debt to those like Paul Schilpp who took us out of the cave to see the real world. May we always be like him, young enough still to be interested in where we are going!