Profile Marjorie Grene: A Remembrance with Special Attention to Her Importance for ISHPSSB Richard Burian Philosophy and Science Studies Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA, USA rmburian@vt.edu Many of you attending this meeting 1 did not have the privilege of knowing Marjorie Grene, who passed away at the age of 98 on March 16, 2009, in Blacksburg, VA. Most of you, of course, have heard her name, at least in connection with our society’s Marjorie Grene Prize. The prize is awarded for the best manuscript derived from a presentation in the preceding two meetings of “ISH” and is intended to help advance the careers of younger scholars. Sadly, it is my duty, but also a great pleasure, to present a capsule account of Marjorie’s career, with emphasis on her importance to our society. Her influence stems from her ap- proach to the history and philosophy of biology (which was quite influential in the early days of the society) and for her specific role in its founding. My presentation will have three stages. The first consists of a brief account of her personal history; the second provides some remarks about the style and content of her thought; and the third offers a personal account (since I was involved at that point) of her connections to the founding of our society and her influence, direct and indirect, on its character. Throughout, I will speak of her as Marjorie, for that is how most of her colleagues and friends knew her and how I will always think of her. Marjorie Glicksman Grene, born December 13, 1910, was an important epistemologist and historian of philosophy and science. She had strong interests in perception and the con- textual relations of knowers to the world around them. Her contributions to history and philosophy of biology, on which she wrote several books, are especially important. After obtain- ing a bachelor’s degree in zoology at Wellesley, she obtained an American-German exchange studentship for 1931–1933, during which time she studied with such figures as Heidegger and Jaspers. Although her graduate studies were undertaken at Harvard, where she worked with Alfred North Whitehead and C. I. Lewis among many others, to her great irritation her doctorate was awarded by Radcliffe College in 1935 be- cause women were not then formally admitted to Harvard. This was just one of many things in her life that led to her keen sense of the injustices done to women and her strong in- terest in assisting women in their careers. From 1937 to 1944 she was an instructor at the University of Chicago, where she participated in the seminars run by Rudolf Carnap and Carl (Peter) Hempel, among others. Unfortunately, her husband, David Grene, an eminent classicist, got embroiled in a quarrel with the provost of the university. She thought that the quarrel cost her her instructorship, but it is not clear this is correct. As a result of these events, she took on the life of a farmer’s wife, first in Lemont, IL, and then in Rathdrum, County Wick- low, Ireland, and of also devoting herself to raising their two children, Ruth and Nicholas. No matter where else she worked, she always returned to the Irish farm, which Nicholas took over sometime after 1965 while working his way up to a profes- sorship at Trinity College, Dublin. She ran the Irish farm until 1960; so she had no regular academic employment for about 17 years. Nonetheless, she did not drop out from academic work or from writing. Her early publications centered on his- tory of philosophy and on 20th-century philosophy in Europe. In 1948 she published Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Exis- tentialism and in 1957 Heidegger. These critical studies were important in bringing continental philosophy to the attention of the English-speaking world; she continued this line of re- search with Sartre (1973) and Philosophy In and Out of Europe (1976). In 1950 she met Michael Polanyi, which turned out to be a key event in her life. She served as his research assistant (largely by correspondence) for the conversion of his 1950 Gifford Lectures into his well-known book Personal Knowl- edge. Thanks in part to this work, she held temporary positions at the University of Manchester (1957–1958, with Polanyi) and then at the University of Leeds (1958–1960), before be- coming a lecturer in philosophy at Queens University, Belfast (1960–1965). Biological Theory 4(2) 2009, 183–187. c 2010 Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research 183