OTIS LEE
1902 - 1948
The College cmmunity and philosophical scholars mourn
the unexpected death of Otis Lee in Peacham, Vermont,
on September 17, l948.
Professor Lee was born in Montevideo, Minnesota, in
1902 and grew up in the Middle West, where he was
strongly influenced by the cultural traditions which
prevailed there -- especially by the idea of the open
society or community. After receiving his B.A. de-
gree from the University of Minnesota in 192h, he went
to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. There he encountered
the German philosophical tradition as it was being
interpreted by the Oxford Hegelians. ‘He returned to
America, again to different traditions, this time at
Harvard, where he came under the influence of the
pragmatism of C. I. Lewis and the metaphysics of A. N.
Whitehead. In 1930 he received his Doctor's Degree and
for the next three years taught in the Philosophy De-
partment there. Then with his wife, Dorothy, he went
to Germany to study for a year with the leading re-
presentative of contemporary Hegelianism, Professor
Richard Kroner, who is now at Union Theological Semi-
nary partly through Professor Lee's assistance in
escaping from the Nuremburg Laws of the Nazis. After
his return to this country, Professor Lee became Chai
man of the Department of Philosophy_at Pomona College
and remained there until he was invited to assume a
similar position at Vassar College in 1938.
During the ten years that Otis Lee was with us he took
an active part in many aspects of community life even
though he did not enjoy robust health. An able violin-
ist, he helped to organize an informal student and
faculty quartette, which often played in his home. A
strong believer in democracy, he acted on his beliefs
by participating in forums and political affairs in
Poughkeepsie - even to ringing doorbells during a
political campaign. He became interested in the Fough-
keepsie Day School, served two years on its Board of
Trustees, and had been President of the Board for a
year at his death.
Within the college community he carried his full share
of committee work. He was eager to develop interde-
partmental courses, and the Freedom Seminar was largely
OTIS LEE (Continued)
the result of his interest and efforts. Himself the
product of many traditions, he worked to build the
Philosophy Department on the principle of diversity.
He played an important part in the education of many
students -— inside and outside the classroom, and
after their graduation -- as teacher, counsellor, and
friend. Kindliness, tolerance, and a passion for
justice characterized his relations with all people.
Besides all this, much of Otis Lee's time and energy
was directed toward writing his forthcoming book,
Existence and Inquiry, the last galleys of which he sent to the University of Chicago Press two years be-
fore he died. Already the author of many articles and
the editor of a book on the philosophy of Whitehead,
Professor Lee had been granted a Guggenheim Fellowship
in l94O to write this work; but never one for hasty
evaluations, he wrote and re-wrote it until last year.
Like his life, the book is a creative and critical
synthesis of the major philosophical traditions in
modern thought. Professor Lee saw in the development
of philosophy since Descartes three main tendencies:
analysis, dialectic, and a pragmatism. In a book which
he was already projecting, he hoped to achieve a
positive reconstruction of modern philosophy, in which
his ideas of value, of the individual, and of the com-
munity were to be developed in the context of American
society. For he recognized the rich possibilities of
contemporary American thought and always refused to
adhere uncritically to strictly European movements.
He was not a Hegelian, a Bergsonian or an Oxfordian,
but a philosopher who sought to bring together these
strands of thought and to interweave them with the
cultural fibers of American life.
Richard A. E. Brooks
Mabel Newcomer
Morris Weitz
XII - 261-265