Grace de Laguna

Grace Mead Andrus was born on 28 September 1878 in East Berlin, Connecticut.^[1] She was the youngest child, and only daughter, of Wallace R. Andrus and Annis Andrus (née Mead).^[1][2] Both parents were of Connecticut ancestry dating back to the 17th century.^[2][3] Her mother, Annis, had been a school teacher.^[1] Her father had served with the 17th Connecticut Volunteers during the Civil War,^[2][4] He would later work as a land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway whilst it was being built.^[4] This led to the family moving, whilst Grace was young, to the (then) Washington Territory, first to Cheney, then Tacoma, where she received a pioneer upbringing.^[1][2]

Grace Andrus took the AB from Cornell University in 1903, where she was Phi Beta Kappa.^[5] And, upon presentation of a dissertation titled “The Mechanical Theory in Pre-Kantian Rationalism”, she received her PhD in philosophy there in 1906.^[2][5]

Whilst studying for the latter she met Theodore de Laguna, an instructor there, whom she married in 1905.^[4][5][6]

After holding a position at the University of Michigan from 1905,^[6] Theodore served, from 1907, as a professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.^[7] Grace became an assistant professor there in 1912, an associate professor in 1916 and a full professor in 1928.^[2][5][8] She became chair of philosophy at Bryn Mawr after Theodore's death in 1930.^[4][5][9] She would retire as Professor Emerita in 1944.^[1] She continued to write, publishing her third book in 1963.^[5]

Her daughter, born in 1906, was the anthropologist Frederica de Laguna, whom Grace would accompany on several anthropological field trips.^[8][9] Her son Wallace de Laguna, who was born in 1910, was a geologist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and later for the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee.^[8][10]

Grace de Laguna died, aged 99, on 17 February 1978 in Devon, Pennsylvania.^[3][11]

Books

• Dogmatism and Evolution: Studies in Modern Philosophy, with Theodore de Laguna (New York, 1910). [At Internet Archive]
• Speech: Its Function and Evolution (New Haven, Conn., 1927). [At Internet Archive]
• On Existence and the Human World (New Haven, Conn., 1963).

Articles/Book chapters

• The Practical Character of Reality in The Philosophical Review, vol. 18, no. 4, 1909, pp. 396–415. JSTOR 2177776
• Phenomena and Their Determination in The Philosophical Review, vol. 26, no. 6, 1917, pp. 622–633. JSTOR 2178030
• The Limits of the Physical in Philosophical Essays in Honor of James Edwin Creighton (1917) [At Internet Archive]
• Internet Archive