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Paul D. Wienpahl (1916-1980)

On March 1, 1980, Paul Wienpahl, Professor of Philosophy, died suddenly and unexpectedly. He would have been sixty-four on March 6. He was a widely published scholar, an exceptionally successful teacher, and an important contributor to the early academic planning and development of the UCSB campus. His loss, so sudden it is hard to grasp, is great indeed.

In 1948, after a year as an Instructor at U.C.L.A., and then a year at N.Y.U., Paul Wienpahl came as an Assistant Professor to the University of California at Santa Barbara. The campus, then still on the Riviera, was intended to become a unique liberal arts college within the University. He was an influential contributor to the realization of that ideal; professional scholar though he was, he remained to the end of his life dedicated to the idea of liberal education and to philosophy as a discipline that liberates.

In 1960, and again from 1963 to 1966, he was chairman of the philosophy department. In 1961, he served as vice president of the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division. In 1966-67 he was director of the UC Education Abroad Study Center at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He was a Ford Foundation fellow in 1954, and in 1969 he was a fellow of the East-West Conference in Philosophy. He was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii in 1976.

Professor Wienpahl was born in Rock Springs, Wyoming, on March 6, 1916. He later lived in Los Angeles, attended UCLA and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, receiving his B.A. magna cum laude there. After receiving his M.A., he served four years in the army during World War II, completing his service as a captain in the tank corps in Europe. He then returned to UCLA and earned his Ph.D. In 1942, he married Janet Elizabeth Ward, who survives him; they have two children, Mark, who is a physician, and Jan, who is an anthropologist.

Paul Wienpahl was from the outset an exceptionally successful teacher, widely popular, deeply respected and admired by his students. In 1957, the faculty of UCSB awarded him the annual faculty prize for being the most effective in “opening new intellectual and cultural vistas to undergraduate students.” Though he regularly gave large and very successful lecture courses, emphasis on the individual student was a hallmark of all his teaching. He had a particular love for teaching philosophy, and his warm and enduring relationships with students at every level were notable signs of the central role the teaching of philosophy played in his life.

His career as a philosophical writer was productive and varied. He wrote important studies on Frege and Wittgenstein, on existentialism and Zen Buddhism, and on Spinoza. He published about forty articles in scholarly journals, and three books: The Matter of Zen, Zen Diary, and The Radical Spinoza. A mere listing of numbers and titles does not reveal the background of personal commitment behind this record. He lived in France for a year studying existentialism; he went to Japan to live in a Zen temple and study under a Zen master; in recent years, as the foundation of his Spinoza studies, he completed his own translation into English of the entire corpus of Spinoza's works. All Wienphal's work was governed by a radical empiricism that he increasingly came to see as a form of mysticism.

PDF: The matter of Zen; a brief account of zazen
by Paul Wienpahl
New York, New York University Press, 1964, pp. 162.
London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1965, pp. 162.

PDF: Zen Diary
by Paul Wienpahl
New York, Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 244.