22 Facts About Melvin Rader

Melvin Miller Rader was an American academic and civil rights advocate.

Melvin Rader was a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, teaching ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy.

Melvin Rader's parents were Cary Melvin Rader, a lawyer, and Harriet Miller Rader, a teacher, and he had two siblings: Ralph and Martha.

Melvin Rader attended the University of Washington, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1925, a master's degree in 1927 and a PhD in English in 1929.

Melvin Rader's studies included the works of John Stuart Mill, Charles William Morris, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin.

Melvin Rader was at the university between 1929 and 1930, when he returned to the University of Washington as an assistant professor of philosophy.

Melvin Rader stayed at the university for the rest of his career; he was an associate professor between 1944 and 1948, a professor between 1948 and 1971 and professor emeritus between 1971 and his death in 1981.

Early in his academic career, Melvin Rader focused on the use of aesthetics and philosophy in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Melvin Rader argued that the self was not primarily associated with senses but instead with the mind, and that this philosophical choice would continue in transcendentalism throughout the nineteenth century in the United States.

Melvin Rader published a second analysis of this work in Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach in 1967.

Melvin Rader edited A Modern Book of Esthetics in 1935, an anthology which became commonly used as a textbook.

Melvin Rader believed that art was a social practice, connected with his humanist approach.

Melvin Rader wrote No Compromise: The Conflict Between Two Worlds, on the history of fascism based on a statement by Benito Mussolini that there cannot be a compromise between fascism and democracy.

Melvin Rader wrote the anthology The Enduring Questions in 1956, covering social and political philosophy through works by Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Mill and Marx.

Melvin Rader was elected president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, president of the American Society for Aesthetics in 1973 and a delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies in 1975.

Later in his career, Melvin Rader published Art and Human Values, co-written with Bertram Jessup, which considered the social purpose of art using gestalt theory.

Melvin Rader received a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his reporting of the events, which led to Rader's exoneration.

Melvin Rader wrote a memoir of his experience with the committee titled False Witness, which was published in 1969.

Melvin Rader helped initiate, and served as a plaintiff in, a lawsuit which went before the United States Supreme Court in 1963 to abolish the loyalty oaths required of faculty at the University of Washington.

Melvin Rader married Katherine Ellis in autumn 1926 and the couple had one son, Gordon, prior to their divorce.

Melvin Rader remarried in March 1935, to Virginia Baker, an artist and teacher, and the couple had four children: Miriam, Barbara, Cary and David.

Melvin Rader was depicted as a character in Mark Jenkins' play, All Powers Necessary and Convenient, about the Canwell committee which premiered at the Playhouse Theatre in 1998.