Woodbridge Riley

From VCencylopedia

Isaac Woodbridge Riley was born in New York City in May of 1869. His father, a Presbyterian Minister, moved the family to Buffalo in 1875. Riley attended the English school in Florence, Italy for several years before returning to the United States to complete his bachelor's degree at Yale. While working towards his master’s degree in philosophy, which he received for his thesis, "The Metaphysics of Mormonism" in 1908, he spent a year teaching English at New York University. He expanded his master's thesis to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1902. The thesis, published as "The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith," drew criticism from the Mormon Church, foreshadowing the kinds of attack that Riley’s unapologetic and often satiric scholarship would receive for the rest of his life.

Throughout his career, Riley was always interested in the development of philosophic thought; most of his work analyzed philosophic or religious movements in Italy or America. While he did not develop a new school of thought or even significantly modify an existing one, he was an excellent philosophic historian with a very good critical eye. He may not have been inventive, but his approach to existing material was often innovative; he combined and compared material in ways no one had thought of before.

He worked for two years as a professor of philosophy at New Brunswick College before becoming a Johnston Research Scholar at Johns Hopkins University in 1904, under the direction of the psychologist James Baldwin. The arrangement seems oddly cross-disciplinary, but psychology had always underscored philosophic study in much of Riley’s work. From 1903 until 1907, he even served as an associate editor of the Psychological Bulletin.

At the end of his tenure at Johns Hopkins, he published the results of his research, which would come to be the work he would be best known for in his lifetime: American Philosophy: The Early Schools. The American National Biography notes that this work was particularly important because, "…it presented for the first time material that previously had been scattered, inaccessible, or almost unknown."

In 1908, Riley became a professor of philosophy at Vassar College. There, he impressed students with his insight and satirical bite. He shared with his students his analytical and critical capacities, instilling in them his deep dislike of fraudulent or sloppy thinking. As his natural abilities led him towards philosophical history and criticism, he was excellent at outlining philosophic movements and demonstrating how they developed over the course of the centuries.

He was also perhaps one of the most notorious professors employed by Vassar in the early twentieth century. For the most part, his humor and satiric inclinations did not instigate too many conflicts. However, in 1917 he published an article entitled "The Faith of Christian Science" for the fourth edition of the Cambridge History of American Literature. In the article, he criticized the religion as inconsistent and illogical. More problematically, he treated the religion’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, in a rather sardonic manner, referring to her as a "thrice-married Trismegistus." The term sounds more insulting than it actually is: "trismegistus" is usually used in reference to the Greek god Hermes. "Hermes Trismegistus" only means thrice-great Hermes. He was attempting to relate Christian Science to the Neo-Platonism of Classical times, but the reference was lost on the Christian Scientists and the overall tone of the article was certainly irreverent. When the head of the church complained, the publishers recalled the edition and replaced Riley’s article. The scandal made the front page of the New York Times; no one seems to have been certain which was more shocking, the article, or the censorship.

Despite this rather notorious run-in with religious conservatism, Riley’s scholarship was respected across the globe. In 1920, the Sorbonne invited him to lecture for a year on American Philosophers. The university later published these letters with an introduction by Henri Bergson, the well-known French philosopher. Riley was a very prolific scholar; he wrote close to one hundred articles on American and Italian philosophy and psychology for publications such as Psychological Review, the Journal of Philosophy, the Bookman, and the Nation. He also worked as an editor and worked with both the Italian magazine Logos and Poughkeepsie’s The Chronicle.

He died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-four in early September of 1933, at his summer cottage in Cape May, New Jersey, shortly before he would have returned to Vassar, leaving behind his wife and five children. Perhaps most fittingly, the Poughkeepsie Evening Star called him, "A lucid thinker, an original talker and writer," adding that "he had a provocative flair of saying or writing what he thought." His students at Vassar would have agreed.

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Sources

"Prof. Riley Dies; Philosopher on Vassar Faculty" Herald Tribune 3 September 1933.

Riley, Woodbridge. "Letter to the Editor" Saturday Review of Literature 16 February 1929.

"Stop Sale of Book Deriding Mrs. Eddy" New York Times 19 April 1921.

Sweetman, Brendan, "Riley, Isaac Woodbridge;" American National Biography Online. Feb. 2000.

Vassarion Yearbooks, 1908-1932.

“Woodbridge Riley,” Biography File, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

"Woodbridge Riley," Photo File 8.31, Special Collections, Vassar College Library.

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CBC, 2005