My name is Vivian Feldblyum. I am a seventh year PhD student in the Department of Philosophy, and my main research interests lie in ethics and ancient philosophy. My current work is concerned with the nature of pleasure, and my dissertation develops an account of pleasure on which it is best understood as a non-intellectual form of evaluative cognition. During the summer of 2022, I worked with Dr. Nicholas Rescher and librarian Jason Rampelt at the Archives of Scientific Philosophy to design a Humanities Engage-funded collections-based module centered on the Rose Rand Papers collection. The module was formatted for PHIL 1200: 20th Century Analytic Philosophy, and the goal of the module is for students to learn about the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, of which Rose Rand was a member, and to use archival sources to practice two important philosophical skills: properly situating philosophy within its historical context and argument analysis.
Initially, the plan was for students to visit the archive and pick a letter or series of letters exchanged between Rose Rand and any of the major philosophers they would have already learned about in the course, including Karl Popper, Rudolf Carnap, Carl Hempel, Otto Neurath, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their assignment would have had two components: analyzing the philosophical content of the letter and crafting their own reply as either Rand or the philosopher she writing to. However, upon visiting the archives, I ran into a bit of a problem; the letters containing philosophical content, rather than merely personal correspondence, are almost exclusively written in German rather than English. While the letters in English are instructive as evidence of how much World War II and antisemitism in the 30s and 40s affected Rose Rand personally and the academy at large, they are not sufficient philosophically for the initial assignment I had in mind. It would be an unreasonable expectation of students in this course to have high level German reading ability, so I knew I would have to shift gears and work with what was available in English in the archive.
Ultimately, I came up with a twofold solution to the problem. I still wanted students to look at the letters, because I think seeing firsthand that the philosophers we study and engage with were real people dealing with the realities of their time is immensely valuable in a history of philosophy course. So, the new plan was to examine the English letters together as a class on a visit to the archives and get a better sense for how World War II was affecting Rose Rand and the other members of the Vienna Circle on a personal level. As for the assignment, I decided that there would be two: (1) a standard philosophy paper analyzing one of Rose Rand’s original works of philosophy, titled “A Study of the Notions ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’ Based on the Questioning of Mental Patients,” and (2) a reflection assignment in which students pick another member of the Vienna Circle and write a reflection on how the historical events of the time shaped their philosophy.
Rose Rand’s own work is extremely understudied beyond her relationships with other philosophers of her era. My thinking is that the first assignment would be a great opportunity to expose students and the wider philosophical community to her original philosophical contributions, while still testing the students on the philosophical analysis tools they will have been building throughout the semester. This particular paper of Rand’s has an interesting tie to her historical context. She first wrote it in 1938 after working at the Psychiatric-neurological Clinic of Vienna University from 1930-1937 during her time as a doctoral student – a job she likely needed to earn money as a student, especially since as a Jew she was barred from pursuing a job in the academy in Austria at the time. She began translating and editing this work into English after she fled as a refugee to London, where she – as can be seen in her letters – continued to struggle finding work in the academy and was forced to work once again as a nurse and later even in a metal factory. If Rose Rand were not a Jewish woman in 1930s Europe, she likely would not have written and later translated and edited this paper; a great tie-in to the second assignment of the reflection on the impact of historical events.
Overall, I feel that I learned a great deal in developing this module. I gained experience with archival research, especially valuable experience with pedagogical flexibility when plans go awry, as well as familiarity with digital technology used in digital archival visits. This will be helpful for future archival modules I hope to incorporate in my teaching. As I said above, my historical area of expertise is ancient philosophy, and I would like to someday arrange archival visits in my ancient philosophy classes to see papyri and the limitations scribes historically had, which often led to present day ambiguities in texts and translation. With the technology I learned about, students could actually annotate papyrus themselves – digitally, of course – and get hands-on experience with the difficult work of translating and interpreting ancient philosophy.