Edward Fröhlich Haskell (August 24, 1906 – 1990) was a
synergic scientist who dedicated his life to the unification of human knowledge into a single discipline.
Biography
Haskell was born in Phillipopolis, now
Plovdiv
Plovdiv (, ) is the List of cities and towns in Bulgaria, second-largest city in Bulgaria, 144 km (93 miles) southeast of the capital Sofia. It had a population of 490,983 and 675,000 in the greater metropolitan area. Plovdiv is a cultural hub ...
, Bulgaria. His mother was a Swiss
missionary
A missionary is a member of a Religious denomination, religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thoma ...
, Elisabeth Fröhlich, who married an American missionary, Edward Bell Haskell, who himself was born in Bulgaria of American missionary parents. During his childhood, the family traveled widely throughout Europe (as a result he learned to speak six languages), before returning to the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
. Haskell attended
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1833, it is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational lib ...
in 1929, where he met
Willard Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine ( ; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth centur ...
who became a lifelong friend. After obtaining his B.A. in 1929, Haskell did a year of graduate studies at
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
.
While hitchhiking during his days as an Oberlin student, Haskell met two wealthy sisters named Reynolds; they were from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. He so impressed them with his ideas and originality that they set up a
trust fund
A trust is a legal relationship in which the owner of property, or any transferable right, gives it to another to manage and use solely for the benefit of a designated person. In the English common law, the party who entrusts the property is k ...
to help support him. This situation appears to have led Haskell to disdain pursuing his research within the context of conventional employment. He lived most of his life alone in a cramped and cluttered student apartment near Columbia University, purchased for him by his half-brother
Douglass Haskell and sister-in-law Helen Haskell.
Haskell maintained close relations with both his full and half brothers and sisters throughout his life. Married twice, in youth and in dotage, he had no children of his own. However, he would indulge his nieces and nephews with his humor, stories, violin, and yodeling. Whether climbing the mountains in the Adirondacks or Alps, Haskell's long stride had his companions running to keep up.
Curious about all aspects of human nature, there was no topic that did not interest him. When other adults would tune out, Haskell would spend time with his young nephews and nieces trying to understand why they were so enthusiastic about the music of this new band, the Beatles. He listened attentively while they played the album "Rubber Soul" to him. Whether he got it or not, he never let on.
Haskell employed the leisure afforded him by his good fortune to travel and write a book, ''Lance — A Novel about Multicultural Men'' (published in 1941) before resuming his graduate studies, this time at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
and the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...
. Although he became a Fellow at University of Chicago in 1940, he never completed his thesis and was not awarded the Ph.D. He left Chicago to teach
sociology
Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociol ...
and
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, society, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behav ...
at the
University of Denver
The University of Denver (DU) is a private research university in Denver, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1864, it has an enrollment of approximately 5,700 undergraduate students and 7,200 graduate students. It is classified among "R1: D ...
and
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn in New York City, United States. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls nearly 14,000 students on a campus in the Midwood and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn as of fall ...
. In 1948, he left teaching to devote himself full-time to private research.
Haskell established the Council for Unified Research and Education (C.U.R.E., Inc.) in 1948, a non-profit research organization for the unification of
science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
and
education
Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...
, which he ran until it was dissolved in the mid-1980s. Among its members were
Harold Cassidy,
Willard Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine ( ; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth centur ...
,
Arthur Jensen
Arthur Robert Jensen (August 24, 1923 – October 22, 2012) was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen was known for his work in psychometrics an ...
, and Jere Clark. CURE's goal was the synthesis of all knowledge into a single discipline, and they established a body of work called "
The Unified Science". Haskell was the guiding light of CURE, and the originator of most of its seminal concepts. In 1972, Haskell published his ''
Full Circle — The Moral Force of Unified Science''. This book has been out of print for many years, but is now available online, gratis. The greater part of Haskell's work on Unified Science work remains unpublished.
Throughout his life, Haskell taught short courses and seminars on Unified Science at Columbia University,
West Virginia University
West Virginia University (WVU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university with its main campus in Morgantown, West Virginia, United States. Its other campuses are those of the West Virginia University Ins ...
,
Southern Connecticut State College,
Drew University
Drew University is a private university in Madison, New Jersey, United States. It has a wooded campus. As of fall 2020, more than 2,200 students were pursuing degrees at the university's three schools. While affiliated with the Methodism, Me ...
, and the
New School for Social Research
The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...
.
Haskell died shortly after suffering an incapacitating
stroke
Stroke is a medical condition in which poor cerebral circulation, blood flow to a part of the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: brain ischemia, ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and intracranial hemorrhage, hemor ...
in his 79th year.
Work
Among the important concepts Haskell put forward were:
* ''The 9 Co-Actions''.
* ''The three classes of relationships'' (positive, negative, and neutral) - recognising the Neutral class of relationships as of equal importance to Adversity and Synergy, not just the boundary between them.
* The
Co-Action Compass as a map or diagram showing the entropic, neutral, or synergetic relationships between positive, negative, and neutral entities.
* ''The Moral Law of the Unified Science'' — the restatement of the spiritual concept of
karma
Karma (, from , ; ) is an ancient Indian concept that refers to an action, work, or deed, and its effect or consequences. In Indian religions, the term more specifically refers to a principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called ...
("As you sow, so shall you reap") as a scientific law of Nature that applies in all the kingdoms of nature, inanimate as well as biological and human
*
Evolution
Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...
as a systems hierarchy
* A variant of the
Great Chain of Being
The great chain of being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God. The chain begins with God and descends through angels, Human, humans, Animal, animals and Plant, plants to ...
, namely the sequence
light
Light, visible light, or visible radiation is electromagnetic radiation that can be visual perception, perceived by the human eye. Visible light spans the visible spectrum and is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400– ...
,
particle
In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass.
They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...
,
atom
Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...
,
molecule
A molecule is a group of two or more atoms that are held together by Force, attractive forces known as chemical bonds; depending on context, the term may or may not include ions that satisfy this criterion. In quantum physics, organic chemi ...
,
plant
Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...
,
animal
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the Biology, biological Kingdom (biology), kingdom Animalia (). With few exceptions, animals heterotroph, consume organic material, Cellular respiration#Aerobic respiration, breathe oxygen, ...
and
human
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus ''Homo''. They are Hominidae, great apes characterized by their Prehistory of nakedness and clothing ...
. Also see the related work by
Arthur M. Young,
Arthur O. Lovejoy, and
Ken Wilber
Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949) is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience. Starting publishing ...
.
Quote
*"''Full Circle'' argues that scientific specialization has destroyed those concepts and values crucial to the survival and regeneration of Western democracy. These values are boldly restated as an assembly of the sciences - physical, biological, and psycho-social - within a single system, the periodic coordinate system of
Unified Science, modelled on
Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many ...
's
Universal Characteristic
The Latin term ''characteristica universalis'', commonly interpreted as ''universal characteristic'', or ''universal character'' in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scienti ...
....." (''Full Circle'' )
Bibliography
* Haskell, Edward et al., ''Full Circle: The Moral Force of Unified Science'', First Published in 1972, New York: Gordon and Breach. . Republished by East West Publishing, Washington, DC, January 2024. (ISBN: 979-8-9877993-38)
See also
*
Unified Science
*
Full Circle (Edward Haskell)
References
Biography
*
'; online version by
Don Steehler and Timothy Wilken of the Time-Binding Trust
{{DEFAULTSORT:Haskell, Edward
Bulgarian scientists
Bulgarian violinists
Yodelers
1906 births
1990 deaths
Oberlin College alumni
Columbia University alumni
Harvard University alumni
University of Chicago alumni
Brooklyn College faculty