Elizabeth Farquhar Flower (1914–1995) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. She co-authored (with Murray G. Murphey) a standard textbook on the history of philosophy, ''History of Philosophy in America.''

Biography

Elizabeth Farquhar Flower was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1914. Her father was a teacher and her mother a nurse. At twenty-one she graduated from Wilson College with a degree in

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

. Initially interested in medicine, she changed the focus of her studies and in 1939 received a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in philosophy from the

. Two years before graduating, she was appointed an assistant instructor, and eight years after graduating, she was appointed assistant professor of philosophy. She received tenure in 1956, and became a full professor in 1974. She was one of the earliest women to enter a career in teaching philosophy at universities in the United States. She taught many students, the most prominent of whom was

Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil and political rights, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights move ...

, who audited one of her early ethics seminars. Many of her articles were published in scientific journals, and in 1977, she published her most popular work ''History of Philosophy in America'', and in 1994 she co-edited, ''Critique of Applied Ethics: Reflections and Recommendations.'' Flower also co-edited ''Morality, Philosophy and Practice'' in 1989 and was a coauthor of ''Principales De La Philosofia NordeAmericana'' She sporadically taught at Columbia (Barnard),

Hamilton College Hamilton College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Clinton, Oneida County, New York, Clinton, New York. It was established as the Hamilton-Oneida Academy in 1793 and received its c ...

, and foreign schools in Peru, Colombia, Chile and Argentina. Flower taught undergraduate ethics for many years at the University of Pennsylvania. She emphasized the impact of Scottish realism on the development of philosophy in America. Outside of teaching philosophy, Flower was secretary of the eastern division of the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

, and she married philosopher

Abraham Edel Abraham Edel (6 December 1908 – 22 June 2007) was a North American philosopher and ethics, ethicist. He was the younger brother of the North American literary critic and biographer Leon Edel, and the uncle of the composer Joel Mandelbaum. He ...

in 1973. She died on June 26, 1995, of cancer.

Bibliography

* ''History of Philosophy in America'' * ''Critique of Applied Ethics'' * ''Morality, Philosophy and Practice'' * ''Principales De La Philosofia NordeAmericana''

Biography

Bibliography

References

Further reading