Tying Up Loose Ends: Ethical Addresses

I have now documented, as well as I can, the entire twenty-one volumes of Ethical Addresses and Ethical Record.  It is a satisfying moment to see the conclusion of what is, however, only the first phase of developing the Bibliography of Ethical Culture.  Nonetheless, there is yet some work to be done, so the true completion of this phase will require a few more steps.

One step is simple quality control to make sure that I haven't missed any addresses.  We've already seen one incidence of that with the Seventh Series!  While it is a bit tedious to do, I am comparing the Contents of each Series with the entries in the Bibliography to make sure that nothing has been inadvertently omitted.  (And done.)

Another step is tracking down the originals of addresses that have been reprinted from other publications.  When documenting the earlier volumes I tried to enter a "note" that indicated the source of the reprinted article.  Eventually I seem to have dropped that effort, which makes the search a bit more tedious, but not difficult.

As always, with such searches, the hunt yields more than expected.  In searching the index of The Forum (Vol. 1-32) for Felix Adler's article, his name appeared immediately after Jane Addams.  Now I have three more citations to consider for inclusion in the Bibliography.  Checking key words in the index, Adler's article appeared in the same entry as that of Paul Carus ("Dawn of a New Religious Era," The Forum. 16 [1893]: 388-96).  Knowing that Carus actively challenged the philosophical grounds of Ethical Culture in other contexts, I had it in mind that the juxtaposition of Adler and Carus in that issue of The Forum might be a debate of some point or other.  As it turns out, Carus had attended the first World Parliament of Religions and was writing about the religion of the future--not, as it happens, Ethical Culture, which was also not mentioned in his article.  Carus did later give three addresses at the Chicago Society, which were collected and published as The Ethical Problem:  Three Lectures on Ethics as a Science in 1899.  I expect there will be more from Dr. Carus.

The Hathi Trust provided the link to The Forum's early index and to the individual volumes that were the subject of the index.  While these could not be downloaded, they could generally be viewed in full and searched for names and key words.  The International Journal of Ethics is also fully available through the Hathi Trust.  As an AEU publication until 1914, the entire serial will eventually need to be searched for possible entries for the Bibliography.  For now, the search will be limited to those addresses that are duplicated in IJE and EA&ER.  One such address is Adler's "The Freedom of Ethical Fellowship," published in the Second Series.  A version of this address was first delivered to students at Cornell University (May 19, 1890) and then published in IJE's first issue (pp. 16 - 30) before it was reprinted in Ethical Addresses in 1896.  The titles are the same, although I have not done a textual comparison.  What I have done is run a keyword search on this volume of IJE for Adler's name.  I was quite surprised when the search turned up a rebuttal article in the same volume ("Moral Theory and Practice," pp. 183-203) by John Dewey.  This "exchange" merits further discussion.  Perhaps we will find such a discussion as we continue this work.