He was the editor-in-chief of Macmillan's eight-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy from 1967, and lectured at New York University, Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research from the 1960s to the 1990s.
[3] He was awarded a scholarship to study in England in 1947, but on his way there, he stopped in New York and ended up staying there for the rest of his life, apart from a brief period teaching at the University of California in Berkeley.
[5] Philosopher Timothy Madigan wrote in an obituary: "Those who knew Edwards will always remember his erudition and his wicked sense of humour.
[ ... ] Never one to hide his own unbelief, he often commented that his two main goals were to demolish the influence of Heidegger and keep alive the memory of Wilhelm Reich, the much-reviled psychoanalyst whose critiques of religion Edwards felt remained valid.
[9][10] Barry Beyerstein wrote that "Skeptics who follow my recommendation and read Reincarnation: A Critical Examination will derive much ammunition for arguing not only with reincarnationists but with 'near-death experience' aficionados and afterlife enthusiasts of other stripes as well.
"[13] Twenty years later, as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edwards wrote an article about Reich, comprising 11 pages as compared to the four devoted to Sigmund Freud.
He pointed out what is of interest to philosophers in Reich: his views concerning the origin of religious and metaphysical needs, the relation between the individual and society and the possibility of social progress, and, above all, the implications of his psychiatry for certain aspects of the mind-body problem.
However, in a BBC interview he said somewhat more: "I concede that Reich had no real competence as a physicist... At the same time I am quite convinced that the orgone theory cannot be complete nonsense.