McHeny, Leemon. "Victor Augustus Lowe (1907-1988)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 609-612.

Abstract

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1907, Victor Lowe received his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering at the Case School of Applied Science in 1928. When his interests turned to philosophy, he went to Harvard University where he studied with Whitehead and C.I. Lewis earning his master of arts degree in 1931 and his doctorate in 1935. He married the novelist Victoria Lincoln in 1934 whom he met while a student at Harvard. Victor and Victoria had two children, Louise and Thomas. When Victoria Lincoln died in 1981, Lowe married Alice Gray in 1984. After teaching at Harvard as an instructor in philosophy, Lowe was then appointed to visiting positions at Syracuse University and Ohio State University until he became associate and then professor of philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. He was Honorary Research Fellow of University College London, Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Visiting Professor at McGill University, George Santayana Fellow at Harvard University, and was active in the American Philosophical Association throughout his career. Lowe retired in 1972 and died in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1988. In mant respects Lowe was the doyen of the school of process philosophy that formed in the wake of Whitehead's last period at Harvard. After writing his Ph.D. thesis on Alexander, Russell and Whitehead under Whitehead's supervision, he produced numerous articles and chapters on Whitehead's thought and his relation to the classic American philosophers. With Robert Baldwin he compiled the bibliography of Whitehead's  writings for the volume in The Library of Living Philosophers, wrote encyclopedia and dictionary entries on Whitehead, and concentrated on the development and comprehensive spectrum of Whitehead's thought in Understanding Whitehead. Unlike other interpreters of Whitehead's thought who focused on one part or another, Lowe's background in mathematics, physics and philosophy gave him a basis for understanding every phase of Whitehead's career, including applied mathematics, mathematical logic, educational theory, philosophy of physics, metaphysics and the later philosophy of civilization. In 1965, he began the project of Whitehead's biography which remained unfinished at his death in 1988. Aside from his work on Whitehead, William James, and C.I. Lewis, Lowe is well known for his battle with Arthur O. Lovejoy and Sidney Hook over matters of academic freedom and communism in the 1950s. At the peak of McCarthyism, Lovejoy and Hook argued for the exclusion of Communists from the faculties of American universities because they surrendered to the Communist Party the objectivity that they saw as essential to the role of the university. Advocates of freedom, they held, should not tolerate those who sought to end such freedom. Lowe fiercely disagreed. In his essay, "In Defense of Individualistic Empiricism: A Reply to Messrs. Lovejoy and Hooke," he charged Lovejoy and Hooke with "vicious intellectualism," a term taken from William James which Lowe interpreted in this context as a fallacy based on the erroneous inference "that every Communist will conform in his teaching and research to our definitive conception of the Communist" and cannot be trusted as a teacher and scholar (1952, 102). He defended Communitst professors on the principle that they should be judged as individuals and not as instances of abstract essences.