Marjorie Grene University of California, Davis

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Marjorie Grene University of California, Davis BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Marjorie Grene was born on 13 December 1910 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She entered Wellesley College in 1927 with an interest in philosophy. She was put off WKHVXEMHFWE\KHUILUVWSURIHVVRU¶VLQVLVWHQFHWKDWVKHDFFHSWWKH&DUWHVLDQcogito as the starting point for philosophical inquiry. In 1931 she went to Freiburg, *HUPDQ\DVDQ$PHULFDQH[FKDQJHVWXGHQWDQGIRXQGKHUVHOILQ:HUQHU%URFN¶V proseminar on Descartes, where she once again was defiant in the face of the cogito: Her refusal to accept the possibility of pure consciousness divorced from sensation or corporeal activity would become a theme of much of her later writing. Perhaps her interest in philosophy would have dissipated in Germany had she not studied under Martin Heidegger. She earned her doctorate in philosophy in 1935 from Radcliffe College, a fact she always mentioned in conjunction with her observation that Radcliffe was ³DVFORVHDVDZRPDQFRXOGJHWWR+DUYDUGLQWKRVHGD\V´$IWHUOHFWXULQJDWWKH University of Chicago until 1944, when the war forced her position to be terminated, she would spend several years as a farmer tending to her family, which she started in 1938 with the famed classicist David Grene. She would later ZULWH WKDW GXULQJ WKLV WLPH VKH OHDUQHG ³$JULFXOWXUDO GXWLHV DQG FULWLFDO philosRSKLHVGLGQ¶WPL[´ A defining point in her life came in 1950 when she met Michael Polyani²the former chemist who was now a philosophical star²who invited her to assist him in preparing his Gifford Lectures, set to be delivered the following year. Polyani turned Grene toward epistemological questions. A second turning point came in 1960, when Belfast offered her a job teaching Greek philosophy, which spurred her on to study Aristotle, which in turn spurred her on to study philosophical biology. Her study of Aristotle and of philosophical biology had two important consequences: first, her publication in 1963 of Portrait of Aristotle (reissued in 1998); second, it led her to read Merleau-3RQW\¶VPhenomenology of Perception. $OWKRXJKPXFKRI*UHQH¶VZRUNKDVFHntered on how insights from science, especially biology, can help us make sense of epistemological questions raised in the works of Aristotle and Merleau-Ponty, the topics of her publication are diverse and numerous. She published on such diverse topics as Sartre, Heidegger, Spinoza, Descartes, Darwin, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. Her books Martin Heidegger (1957) and Introduction to Existentialism (1959) are often credited with introducing Continental philosophy as a popular topic in the English speaking world. Upon her death in 2009, Grene was remembered as a sharp philosopher, proud to have broken new ground for women in academic philosophy who was always kind to younger colleagues. .

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