Van Meter Ames

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Van Meter Ames (July 9, 1898–November 5, 1985)

Ames was born in De Soto, Iowa, the son of Mabel Van Meter Ames and Edward Scribner Ames (1870-1958). His father taught in the philosophy department at the University of Chicago and was pastor of the University Church of the Church of the Disciples of Christ and dean of the Disciples Divinity House.

Ames married Betty Breneman. Their children are Sanford Scribner Ames, Damaris Ames, and Christine Ames Cornish [[1]]

Ames received his B.A. and Ph.D (1924) from the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati in 1925 and became chairman of the department of philosophy in 1959. Ames received a Rockefeller grant to study French philosophy in 1948, was named Fulbright research professor at Komazawa University in Tokyo, and was designated Humanist Fellow for Outstanding Contributions to Humanist Thought in Ethics and Aesthetics in 1976 by the American Humanist Association [[2]]. He had interim appointments at Cornell University, the University of Texas, the University of Hawaii, Columbia University, and the University of Aix-Marseille, where he was the first American faculty member. He retired in 1966.

Ames's works include Aesthetics of the Novel (1928), Proust and Santayana: The Aesthetic Way of Life (1937), André Gide (1947, Zen and American Thought (1962), Prayers and Meditations (1970), and To Find the Simple Things (1978).

He wrote numerous book reviews for The Humanist when Warren Allen Smith [[3]] was the journal's book review editor. To Smith, he wrote of the word humanism:

• I doubt if I could say anything more or better on the subject of my naturalistic humanism than I did in The Humanist (Issue 1, 1951).

In The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (March 1952), Ames wrote “The Humanism of Thomas Mann.” He found that “from first to last Thomas Mann thinks in terms of a conflict between unconscious nature and conscious spirit. Yet the discussions between the Jesuit Naphta and the humanist Settembrini in The Magic Mountain introduce something new: in considering science as a possible escape from the verbal squirrel cage.” Ames finds that the work scarcely seems to be a tribute to science, unless obliquely, by letting the reader see the inadequacy of unscientific attitudes and the danger of pseudo-science. Ames also found that, for Mann,

• God is the personification of value as found in human experience, refined by the thought and feeling of such men as Ikhnaton, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and Joseph. God becomes remote, with a mysterious plan that overrides human feelings, when Mann reverts to a dualism that not only reverses the novel’s drift but is anachronistic in attributing to ancient Israel the divorce of nature and spirit, practical life and religion, which came to be assumed by medieval Jews and Christians. Assertion of this divorce makes one wonder how far Mann has come toward the coalescence of the sacred and secular in scientific humanism.

(See Philosopedia entry for Ames, a professor of philosophy [[4]]).