[1][3] His studies included the works of John Stuart Mill, Charles William Morris, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin.
[1] After graduation, Rader began teaching at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as an assistant professor of English.
He argued that the self was not primarily associated with senses but instead with the mind, and that this philosophical choice would continue in transcendentalism throughout the nineteenth century in the United States.
[4][5] It included more than thirty essays by philosophers such as David Hume, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey, divided into sections on the definition of art as semblance, beauty and wish fulfillment.
[4] He wrote the anthology The Enduring Questions in 1956, covering social and political philosophy through works by Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Mill and Marx.
[12][13] When Rader and his family attempted to prove that they had instead been staying at Canyon Creek Lodge near Granite Falls, Washington, they discovered that the evidence had gone missing.
[7] Following the accusation, Rader renewed his focus on liberal democracy, serving as the president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for three terms in 1957, 1961 and 1962.
[8] He helped initiate, and served as a plaintiff in, a lawsuit which went before the United States Supreme Court in 1963 to abolish the loyalty oaths required of faculty at the University of Washington.
He remarried in March 1935, to Virginia Baker, an artist and teacher, and the couple had four children: Miriam, Barbara, Cary and David.
[18] He was depicted as a character in Mark Jenkins' play, All Powers Necessary and Convenient, about the Canwell committee which premiered at the Playhouse Theatre in 1998.