The Rice Institute began classes on September 23, 1912, and the opening was formally celebrated several weeks later by an international academic festival that brought together famous scholars from around the world, Rice faculty and students, and Houston citizens. Hence from the very beginning Rice has reached out to both the local and international communities to enrich its educational endeavors. During its earliest years, Rice offered a variety of public lectures open to the general community. It is difficult for us today to imagine how isolated the original Rice faculty must have felt, recruited as they had been from the world’s great centers of learning and finding themselves teaching at an infant university on the southwestern edge of a small, still raw Texas city.
Yet the rapid growth of Houston attracted an increasing number of able professional men. As Rice’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, said in 1912 in describing the city of Houston, here “you will learn to talk about lumber and cotton and railroads and oil, but you will also find every ear turned ready to listen to you if you really have anything to say about literature or science or art.” The Rice faculty sought more interaction with these men of intellect and creativity beyond the hedges, recognizing that both faculty and community professionals had much to offer each other. Several Rice faculty, notably Professors Griffith C. Evans in mathematics, Harold A. Wilson in physics, and Percy J. Daniell in applied mathematics, together with others, met to discuss plans for increasing intellectual contacts with the creative minds in the city. These plans, first explored toward the end of the First World War, came to fruition in 1919 with the organization of the Houston Philosophical Society. The term philosophical was understood in the broad sense with which it had been used by the American Philosophical Society in the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and by similar organizations in Great Britain to cover the whole range of scientific and humanistic interests and inquiries.
The first meeting of formal organization was held on January 18, 1920, at the University Club in downtown Houston. At the initial meeting Professor H. A. Wilson was elected president, Professor G. C. Evans secretary, and Mr. S. G. McCann (the registrar at Rice) treasurer. Three additional members were elected to serve on the executive council: Professors C. W. Heaps, H. B. Weiser and R. A. Tsanoff. The persons listed here, whose main work was respectively in physics, mathematics, history, chemistry, and philosophy, indicate the wide range of interests that has characterized the Society from the beginning.
At the initial meeting of the Society, following the necessary administrative business, President Lovett of Rice congratulated the Society on its inauguration and, as the minutes of that occasion say, “suggested that Mr. Wilson give some explanation of Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation as a subject of engrossing scientific interest.” The minutes continue, “The members heard the short explanation with understanding and appreciation.” While not all the subsequent topics have been so weighty, from that evening forward the meetings of the Society have included dinner and then a talk on a substantive matter. On the evening of December 15, 1927, the Society met for the first time in the newly opened Cohen House on the Rice campus, where it has met since.
The membership has grown to include a significant cross section of university faculty and members from the greater Houston community. Leaders from the business, legal, medical, engineering, ministerial, architectural, and other professions now adorn the membership. Much of the pleasure and intellectual stimulation associated with the Society comes from the conversation during the cocktail hour and over dinner among the members, and the range of questions from the floor addressed to the speakers’ papers, published at the back of this booklet, gives some idea of the rich intellectual fare the members had enjoyed for more than eight decades.
The Society has evolved over the years. For much of its history the Society was a decidedly male enclave, but at the May 1987 meeting it was decided to recast the language of the bylaws so that they did not imply that one had to be male to be a member. By the next year several women had been elected, and women have continued to play a significant role in the activities of the Society. The Society desires to reflect the community of which it is apart and is always interested in acquiring new members.
Today the Society has no gender or racial restrictions on its membership. Its maximum of 240 active members (there is a separate category of retired members) is divided among six sections, representing men and women of accomplishment and curiosity drawn from throughout the Houston community. What still brings them together seven times annually is a desire for information, inspiration, and understanding. Philosophy means the love or pursuit of wisdom. This Society honors that occupation.