University of California Bancroft ~ibrary/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office William Ray Dennes PHILOSOPHY AND THE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1915 With an Introduction by Stephen Coburn Pepper An Interview Conducted by Joann Dietz Ariff Berkeley 1970 All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and William Ray Dennes, dated July 16, 1969. The manuscript is thereby made avail- able for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manu- script may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of Califor- nia at Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be ad- dressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anti- cipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with William Ray Dennes requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond. WILLIAM RAY DENNES CHRONOLOGY, from Who's Who born: Healdsburg, Sonoma County, California, April 10, 1898, son of Edward Frederick and Harriet Ray Dennes. educated: A.B. University of California, 1919, M.A., 1920; D.Phil., Oxford University, England, 1923; Doctor of Laws, New York University, 1951. married: Margaret Munroe Stevenson, June 22, 1923. children: Richard Merriam, Margaret Stevenson (Mrs. Edwin Honig) career: Mills fellow in philosophy, U.C., 1920, instructor in philosophy, 1923-24, assistant professor, 1924-27, associate professor, 1927-32, and 1933-36, professor since 1936, chairman of department, 1941-43,1944-48, Mills Professor of intellectual and moral philosophy, civil polity, 1958-65, emeritus, 1965-, dean, graduate division, 1948-55, associate professor of philosophy, Yale University, 1932-33, visiting professor of philosophy, Harvard University, 1935, and Stanford University, 1941,1943. service: U.S. Navy, 1918-19, Ass istant Director, Manhattan District, Los Alamos Project, 1943. awards : University medal, University of California, 1919, Rhodes Scholarship, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1920-23, Guggenheim fellowship in Germany and England, 1929-30. memberships : Pres ident, association of graduate schools of the Asso- ciation of American Universities, 1952, Chairman, graduate council, Association of Land Grant Colleges and Universities, 1952, Conferenc-e on Science, Philosophy and Religion, 1952, Fellow, Royal Society for the Arts, American Philosophical Association (pres. Pacific Div., 1945), Mind Society, Great Britain, Alpha Kappa Lambda, Phi Beta Kappa (pres. Alpha Chapter of California, 1941-42), Faculty Club, University of California at Berkeley. INTERVIEW HISTORY The following interview with William Ray Dennes is a part of the Regional Oral History office's University History series. The Preface and lists following refer the reader to the other inter- views in the series. Time and Setting , William R. Dennes was interviewed by Mrs. Joann of Interviews : Ariff in August and September 1967. After one meeting at Professor Dennes' home at 15 Eucalyp- tus Road, Berkeley, he and Mrs. Ariff recorded the remainder of the interviews in Professor Dennes ' campus office. Conduct of the Mrs. Ariff conducted the interviews from notes Interviews : gathered on Professor ~ennes' life and organized in a chronological fashion. Outlines of the questions to be asked were not submitted in advance; rather, Professor ~ennes'sharp memory and interest in the project gave order and momentum to the interviews. Editing and Following transcription, the interviews were Completion of the edited in the Regional Oral History Office, Manuscript : chaptered, and rearranged slightly as the divi- sions in the Table of Contents indicate. In March 1968 the manuscript was sent to Professor Dennes for his editing and for his addition of material on the Miller Institute for Basic Research in the Sciences. He understood and appreciated the need for retention of the conversationa 1 quality in the manuscript, and with reassurance that his anec- dotes didn't outweigh the material surrounding them and that they were in fact essential to this kind of history, he returned the corrected manuscript to the office in May 1969. The edited manuscript, when typed, was given the careful proofreading of Mr. James Sisson, Univer- sity Archives, The Bancroft Library. The Intro- duction was prepared by Stephen Coburn Pepper, an interviewee himself in the first series of Univer- s ity History interviews, and an interested advisor to the project. The General Library University of California, Berkeley 17 December 1969 INT RODUCTI ON by Stephen C. Pepper I first saw Will Dennes when I came to Berkeley in 1919-20. That was the year he was getting his M.A. under C.I. Lewis. We saw quite a little of each other. He was clearly a coming young philo- sopher--a .troll, blond, fine-looking fellow, extremely brilliant, a little stiff in manner, rather conscious of being a Westerner, and coming off a farm, modest, and cultivated, yet still rather "green" to the world, and obviously a good boy. There were not many boys like him in Berkeley at this time. The regular fraternity boy aspired to the senior's broad brimmed hat and corduroy trousers and rough, strong voice, and gait in the image of a forty-niner. I can understand many reasons why Will and his friend Scofield left living at his fraternity and moved down to Mrs. Day's quiet, cultured surroundings . One remark of his sticks in my mind and reveals a lot about him at that time. We were walking in the hills, as occasionally we did, and looking across the bay at San Francisco. I remarked on what a shame it was to have laid out the city in an uncompromising grid across those beautiful hills. His reply was, "How else would one lay out a city?'' With my memory full of old Boston and the many cities of Europe, I was perfectly astonished, and immediately realized he had never seen anything different. His question was a real question. He really wanted to know. Nothing could have developed him more completely than the Rhodes scholarship which he earned. When he came back from Europe three years later, he was culturally as fully rounded out by Oxford and travels on the Continent as any man could be. There was never any question, so far as I recall, that we wanted him in our Department as soon as he received his Oxford Ph.D. And it seemed fortunate to Ellen and me at the time he returned that as we were to be away that year on a leave-of-absence, Will and his bride, Margaret, could rent our house while looking for a more per- manent place of their own. Then that September came the terrible Berkeley fire. We were in Paris that fall with my parents. And the Tolmans, who were neighbors of ours in Berkeley, were there too. There was an item in the New York Herald of Paris about the fire, very brief, but we figured out it must have swept our district. Presently, we received telegrams confirming the loss of our two houses, and later letters telling all about it. Will's letter was detailed and vivid and characteristically as concerned about our loss as his. Actually in proportion the Dennes' lost much more than we, for they lest practically all their possessions while we had many valuable things out in storage, We also had our clothes. And, as Will says in his brief account in the oral history, his brother-in-law, with friends, managed to get out a good deal of our furniture. I found the letter he wrote at the time recently, and sent him a copy. It is such a moving account, and so characteristic of Will and Margaret too, that it would seem to me a fitting and valuable addition to this biography. In a way, the calamity brought us inti- mately together as nothing else could have done more quickly. From that time on our mutual story would be the almost family- like intimacy of our membership in that small, great Berkeley Phil- osophy Department of the '30's and '40's. Our philosophical views were almost diametrically opposite once Will espoused the new pos i- tivistic theory. But such differences were part of the policy and the strength of the Department. It does not come out in the oral history that he was not a positivist when he first arrived fresh from Oxford. He was an ardent Crocean under the discipleship of his Oxford teacher, J.A. Smith. This came out right after his arrival in Berkeley at the weekly De- partment meetings that we had at lunch time in the Faculty Club. No one in the Department was particularly keen about Croce and we were also surprised because Will did not seem the sort of person to remain happy as a doctrinal Crocean. Most of us at that time regarded Croce as a soft, latter-day idealist. (Since then I have changed my mind about him on finding the germs of the contextualist aesthetics in his writings.) The Department,much as a family does, jumped on will's infatuation, and apparently during the year I was away shattered it. For when I got back in 1924, I think Will had already turned positivist to the exact opposite extreme of any idealism, out-distancing even our naturalists Marhenke and Prall in the radicalness of his empiricisms. He became, according to the positivist formula, completely anti-meta- physical, which none of the rest of us in the Department were. I half believed that this was his revenge on us for taking away from him his faith (almost) in Crocean idealism.