tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post7535455916025431872..comments2024-03-29T03:19:09.227-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FOUR FIFTH INSTALLMENTRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-80664360973933081312010-07-03T04:09:42.320-04:002010-07-03T04:09:42.320-04:00Dear Steven
Thank you for writing in. I am stagg...Dear Steven<br /><br />Thank you for writing in. I am staggered to learn that Arrow was the dissertation director. If anyone ever publishes these memoirs [ha!], I will rewrite that part. I did some googling and gathered you had gone into computers and such -- you obviously had a good sense of where the real growth industry was. I trust you have flourished.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-32986982676891643082010-07-01T18:33:28.358-04:002010-07-01T18:33:28.358-04:00Funny seeing this again after all these years. For...Funny seeing this again after all these years. For the historical record, it was Professor Arrow who supervised my dissertation very closely and with whom I discussed all my proofs. (Professor Rawls was on leave my final year.) If I did slip something past him, it was due no doubt more to my wild hand waving and fast talking than to any inattention on his part. <br /><br />In the paper (and thesis) you wrote about, I was attempting to articulate a new concept of preference priority. Ordinality restrictions then lead to a kind of dictator class emerging, one who would be justified in the Rawlsian world as the worst off class. At the time, that seemed like such an obvious result to me that its possible I might have missed some logical fallacy. Don't really know.<br /><br />Of course, the other half of the ordinality result also allowed logically the dictator to represent the best off class. Who knew at the time that this was to become the guiding principle for all social policy from that time onwards. Sigh.<br /><br />Anyways, academia clearly wasn't for me. Computers and I got along so much better out here in Silicon Valley. And with computers, you knew exactly where you stood. The program either worked or it didn't. Ha. Just kidding. That's not even remotely true either.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07879360903751480596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-33309839481147625162010-06-01T03:39:47.998-04:002010-06-01T03:39:47.998-04:00Thank you for your quick response.
I thought your...Thank you for your quick response.<br /><br />I thought your comments about Rawls (and Arrow) over the Strasnick dissertation priceless. However, have you looked at Rawls' Collected papers, Strasnick's JPhil article is cited. (The only "Wolff" mentioned in the papers, I think, is a certain Leibnizian.)<br /><br />Did you know that Stewart Thau died a few years ago? (I was very fond of him not in the least because he hired me at SU.)<br /><br />Until I read your memoirs I had no idea that Charles Parsons was Talcott Parsons' son. (Coincidentally, I just wrote a piece about Talcott P's influence on George Stigler.)Eric Schliesserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13840436384353801701noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-51979343155319418002010-05-31T12:47:16.388-04:002010-05-31T12:47:16.388-04:00Eric, I did not meet Knight. That was at the very...Eric, I did not meet Knight. That was at the very end of his tenure there, and although I met several important members of the Political Science Departnment [Hans Morgenthyau, most notably], I never met the folks in Economics. Partly, that is because I was there for only two years, and partly because a good deal of my time was spent in the College teaching the survey Social Science course. Also, at the time, I knew virtually nothing about economics.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-12331802128191801122010-05-31T11:58:57.890-04:002010-05-31T11:58:57.890-04:00I am adoring your memoirs for all the gossip and i...I am adoring your memoirs for all the gossip and insight.<br /><br />Your points about Rawls are spot on. I think the Kantian turn can, in part, be explained as a way to distance himself from (and surpass) his roots in economics of the 50s and 60s.<br /><br />I do have a question about your time at Chicago. Did you encounter Frank Knight? (I am trying to figure out what his role in the philosophy department.)Eric Schliesserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13840436384353801701noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-15162973185266623312010-05-26T04:35:11.081-04:002010-05-26T04:35:11.081-04:00Enzo, Thank you for the interesting comments. I ...Enzo, Thank you for the interesting comments. I confess that I paid little or no attention to the materials in Part III, principally because it seemed to me to be very old fashioned psychologizing. I think Rawls had a really brilliant idea [the bargaining game] that didn't pan out. That is true for lots of first-rate philosophers, of course. We would have nothing to talk about in philosophy if we cast aside everyone whose great ideas had not panned out! But for me, the deeper question is why Rawls enunciated what at first was a really radical idea of social redistribution and then spent the rest of his life backing away from it.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-90201698864321013952010-05-25T20:24:52.519-04:002010-05-25T20:24:52.519-04:00I particularly like your observations on Rawls. On...I particularly like your observations on Rawls. One always hears that his work was especially important because it revived normative political philosophy -- yet I often thought that TJ owed much of its initial success to the fact that it purported to base its main claims on non-normative fashionable intellectual developments of the 1950's and 60's: game/collective choice theory for Part 1 (the contractualist argument), and moral development theory (Kohlberg etc.) for Part 3 (stability & sense of justice). Part 2 contains many interesting observations but it is probably not essential to the argument. <br /><br />Anyway, the curious thing is that Kohlberg's theory of the stages of moral development was largely abandoned fairly quickly (also thanks to feminist critiques), and the untenability of Rawls' claims about the status of his principles of justice in relation to collective choice theory was also exposed (by yourself and others) before too long. Yet, despite the demise of its initial propelling factors, somehow the Rawls industry carried on unscathed. Sometimes I wish I realised this before devoting so much of my PhD to criticising Rawls.enzo rossihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06743937670761144450noreply@blogger.com