Arthur Bierman

1923 - 2022

Arthur Bierman
November 15, 1923 - June 3, 2022
A dapper, inquisitive, and outspoken man-about-town in both San Francisco and Rome, Arthur Kalmer Bierman died from complications of a fall on June 3, 2022 at the age of ninety-eight. During his journey from a childhood on a subsistence farm to a long academic career, interspersed with social and union activism, Bierman inspired and mentored many people over the years. He was widely admired and appreciated throughout his life. Long lunches and dinners and a daily martini or three were important rituals in what can only be called a long, fulfilled life.
Arthur Kalmer Bierman was born November 15, 1923 in Madison County, Nebraska. An only child, Bierman grew up on a 160 acre farm during the depression. While he handled his farm chores, he always felt it wasn't the life for him. In fact, he described himself as, "an urban intellectual born on a farm." He attended a one-room schoolhouse until high school when he went to The Lutheran high school in the town of Madison, Nebraska where his maternal grandparents lived in a home built by his grandfather. While his family found meaning within the Missouri Lutheran tradition, Bierman rejected this orthodoxy early in life and became a passionate atheist. He was a mediocre student in school, but at an early age took to educating himself through reading, a passion that continued until he died with a newspaper at his side. Bierman was as well read as is possible, and had an incredibly broad background in many subjects.
Bierman attended Midland College, a Lutheran institution in Fremont, Nebraska. There he met Susan Reynolds (1924-2006) of Fremont, who would become his first wife. After three years of college he traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan to apply for law school at the University of Michigan. He happened to meet the admissions officer and had Milton's Paradise Lost under his arm. The officer was impressed with their conversation about the book, also a favorite of the officer, and asked for his transcript and diploma. After Arthur replied he hadn't yet graduated, the officer stated the need for a Bachelor's degree, but allowed him to start anyway based upon their conversation. The law didn't suit him, and he quickly transferred to philosophy, which would become the center of his intellectual universe. He went to UC Berkeley briefly, but finished his Ph.D. at University of Michigan.
In the midst of his college career Arthur joined the US Navy and trained as a fighter pilot. He took such intensive training that he was promoted to Ensign and became a flight trainer. This suited him, as he preferred not to be in direct combat. While at University of Michigan he had a daughter, Megan Mary Bierman, born in 1950 in Willow Run, Michigan. He moved with his young family to San Francisco with no job prospects, but rather because he and Susan loved it there. The life of the city became another great passion for both Arthur and Susan, the latter a well-known civic activist and former two-term San Francisco Supervisor. After living in Westlake, they settled on Carmel Street in the upper Haight-Ashbury. His son, Benjamin Reynolds Bierman was born there in 1954. Shortly after that the family moved around the corner to Shrader Street.
Bierman first sold Heinz products to grocery stores downtown, a neighborhood he loved and would later move to. While delivering groceries nearby, armed with a Ph.D. in philosophy, he dropped into the original San Francisco State College when it was still just off Market Street looking for work. Again with a book under his arm he made a quick impression. It turned out that by chance someone was going on leave, and before leaving the building that day he had been introduced to the Dean and had been hired for a one-year full-time appointment. He subsequently convinced the school they needed a philosophy department, which he then helped found, creating a permanent job for himself that he held for over thirty years. Bierman was a loved, but somewhat feared professor—tough and demanding but inspiring to many.
Bierman was also a political activist on a variety of levels. At SF State he helped organize the teacher's union and led the professors' strike in the late 1960s for improved shared governance and in support of a student-proposed Black Studies program. He went on to organize numerous colleges throughout the State College system in California. He was also quite proud of his work, along with friend and colleague Herb Williams, in organizing against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), eventually leading to HUAC deciding to not have hearings in San Francisco. Arthur and Susan were both deeply involved in Haight-Ashbury and San Francisco politics. Amongst their close friends were George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein, Willie Brown, and the Burton brothers, and together they helped shape the political landscape of the 1960s through the 1980s. After the SF State strike Bierman taught for one year as a visiting professor at Vassar College.
The strike took a lot out of him and Bierman's political activism took a back seat to a life-long philosophical project challenging traditional philosophical orthodoxy in the area of conceptual logic. Also during his career Bierman wrote numerous books. His first, Logic: A Dialog, was a textbook that he wrote for himself to use in his teaching, printing it and binding it in his basement for years until he found a publisher. Along with Jim Gould he edited Philosophy for a New Generation, a textbook anthology, which at the time was the largest selling philosophy text in history and went through seven editions. The success of this book led to three more textbooks: Religion for a New Generation, co -edited with Jacob Needleman; Life and Morals: An Introduction to Ethics; and The Critical Thinking Handbook, co-written with his friend and colleague Robin Assali. His monograph, The Philosophy of Urban Existence, brought back the idea of city states and encouraged community activism. Part of this project, along with his former student Rod Lundquist, was to create art centers in all San Francisco neighborhoods. They created events in libraries and venues around the city, leading to the formation of the Neighborhood Arts Program and eventually the creation of a new city agency for the arts. Bierman wrote seven plays, several of which were staged. Fluent in Italian after many years in Rome, he translated Sealed in Stone, a novel by Toni Maraini, from Italian into English.
Bierman divorced from his first wife Susan in 1972. He married the poet and SF State colleague Kathleen Fraser, eventually moving to Russian Hill. The two of them fell in love with traveling and with Rome. Bierman had always been involved with small real estate and was able to retire from teaching in his late 50s. He and Kathleen purchased a condominium in Trastevere, Rome and spent four months out of the year there over the next thirty-five years. He was perhaps most at home in Rome, "a real Roman," his friends there said, and in his later life his time in Rome, his partnership with Kathleen, and his philosophical work were his passions.
Preceded in death by his second wife, Kathleen Fraser, in 2018, he is survived by his daughter, Megan Bierman of San Francisco, his son Benjamin Bierman of Brooklyn, six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.