seitens der Städte, CAMBRIDGE, Dorothy Emmet

CAMBRIDGE 2009 Dorothy settled in Cambridge in 1966
Foto:G.Ludovice

Dorothy Mary Emmet

(September 29, 1904 – September 20, 2000)

Was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years.
President of the Aristotelian Society in 1953-54.
In 1938, she was appointed lecturer in the philosophy of religion at Manchester, becoming reader in philosophy in 1945 and the Sir Samuel Hall professor of philosophy in 1946.
Appointed lecturer in philosophy at Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (now Newcastle University) in 1932 temporary teaching post at Somerville College, Oxford Commonwealth Fellowship at Radcliffe College

Dorothy borned in London in 1904, lived an extraordinary life, especially for a woman for her time.The daughter of a country vicar and Christian scholar who was appointed dean of university college at Oxford shortly before his premature death, Dorothy graduated at the top of her class at Oxford, with firsts in Classic and philosophy.

After listening to a speech in Parliament by R.H. Tawney supporting poor Welsh miners in the General Strike of 1926, she underwent "the nearest thing i ever had to a conversion experience", she said. It change her life.

She went to live in the Rhondda valley, where she worked in the poor mining communities as a tutor for the Workers Educational Association, teaching Plato´s Republic to unemployed miners and their families.

The experiene made her a socialistand, at same time, drew her more deeply into philosophy in a search for understanding the human condition and spirit.

When Dorothy was twenty two, she read a book by Alfred North Whitehead, a former Cambridge mathematician and philosopher who was teaching at Harvard University, and her life took a new direction. Tere, she worked with the eigthy-year-old Whitehead and becam a family friend.

Dorothy return to Britan in 1928 as a research fellow at Oxfrod and continued her work with miners. In 1932 she published her first book, Whitehead philosophy of organism.

In the summer of 1941, when Ilse told her that Kafka´s Dora was at the Isle of Man Women´s Internment Camp, and "couldn´t we have her there " Dorothy responded simply "i said, of course". "It was the time of air raids" Dorothy recalled almost sixty years later in an interview she gave for her nursing home in Cambridge in the summer of 2000, shortly before her death.

"I can still remeber the three of us, Dora, Marianne, and myself, crawling together underneath the big steel table in the living room during an air raid, and waiting there together until the sirens ended."

Dorothy Emmt had been involved in saving Jewish refugges from Nazi persecusions sice coming to Manchester three years earlier, in 1938, at the age of thirthy-four.

Unmarried, without a family to take care of, she was able to sponsor a number of German and Polish refugees, allowing them to emmigrate to Britain. She opened her home to Ilse and several others until they were able to find their own places. As many testified at a memorial service in Cambridge, in 2002, Profesor Emmet practiced what she taught. The philosophy she preferred, "connect to the real world and could make a difference."

Thomas Merton's Correspondence with: Emmet, Dorothy Mary, 1904-2000

Thomas Merton discussed articles with Emmett for Theoria to Theory about "death of God" theology, the ethics of the war in Vietnam, Christian consciousness, and the prophets. Merton's critical review of the book Two Leggings by Peter Nabokov drew counter-criticism from a reader of Theoria to Theory, Mary R. Glover, who sent a letter to Emmet which she passed on to Merton. Included is Merton's response in which he clarifies the respect he has and value he sees in Native American spirituality; however, he feels that Two Legging's "manipulation of the religious system... renders his entire religious experience suspect". He also replies to another point Glover makes about Hinduism.
Dorothy Emmet was the author of a number of books on philosophy and helped found the department of philosophy at the University of Manchester, where she served as head of the department. After retiring from her professor ship, she settled in Cambridge in 1966.

There she became the first editor of the journal Theoria to Theory, to which Merton was a contributor. She was interested in philosophy's application to political and social issues and "taught Plato to unemployed Welsh miners" (source: Obituary: Dorothy Emmet. 25 September 2000. The Guardian.

‹http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,373005,00.html›).

Publications
Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (1932)
The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (1945)
Annual philosophical lecture to the British Academy (1949)
The Stanton lectures in Cambridge (1950-53)
Function, Purpose and Powers (1958)
Rules, Roles and Relations (1966)
In The Moral Prism (1979)
The Effectiveness of Causes (1986)
The Passage of Nature (1992)
The Role of the Unrealisable (1994)
Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of 70 Years in Philosophy (1996)
Im.wikipedia/The Thomas Merton Centre/Kafka´s last love