I received sad news today.
Owen De Long, my Junior year philosophy tutee at Harvard in 1959-60, has
passed away in distressing circumstances.
Owen was, as I recall him from that time, a bright, handsome young man. His most notable accomplishment, in the eyes
of many of us, was winning the heart of a brilliant, luminous Radcliffe
undergraduate, Jane Mansbridge, whose father, as I recall, headed up the
American division of Cambridge University Press. Jane has gone on to become a widely read and
much acclaimed political theorist who teaches now, with her husband,
sociologist Christopher Jencks, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
That was a remarkable little tutorial group. There were five Junior year philosophy majors
in all, four men and one woman. My favorite
was a tall, lanky man with a shock of red hair, Tom Cathcart. Tom and I reconnected in New York some years
ago when I went there to give a talk at a small gathering of African-American
philosophers. He has since made quite a
stir with a little book he and Dan Klein wrote called Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, an exposition of the main
fields of philosophy through jokes. Tom
has just published The Trolley Problem,
which I am proud to say carries a praising blurb by me. Tom is still tall, lanky, and irrepressibly
cheerful, but like many of us, he has lost most of his hair. Quite the most forgettable member of the
tutorial group was David, a small, thin, very smart young man who wrote a
lovely final paper on Clarence Irving Lewis' important -- but now all but
forgotten -- book, Mind and the World
Order. The next year, I wrote a
letter for David that helped him to win a Rhodes Scholarship. David grew up to become Supreme Court
Associate Justice David Souter. I have
totally lost touch with the other two members of the group, Michael David Levin
and Catherine Cooper, and Google has been unable to tell me what became of them. Inasmuch as the group met fifty-four years
ago, I am compelled to infer that they are all in their seventies now, but to
me they will always be bright, promising undergraduates.
5 comments:
I do not know any of these people (heard of Suter!) but this person is "David Michael" Levin, is a philosopher, and graduated from Harvard in 1961.
http://www.amazon.com/David-Michael-Kleinberg-Levin/e/B001IXMD3K
http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/kleinberg-levin.html
Meant Souter above. Apologies.
Wow! Thank you. What a little group that was. Fantastic.
Bob, How did you hear of Owen's death? I can't find anything on Google. As you probably know, Owen had an interesting career. He was involved for several years in the late '60s with Mel Lyman's Avatar community on Fort Hill in Roxbury and figures prominently in the long, strange saga of that group, reported at great length in Rolling Stone in 1971 (available on Google under "Mel Lyman"). I bumped into him a cafe in Woodstock in the '60s but hadn't seen him since. His recent class reports have sounded more ordinary than his '60s life (aren't we all?). I'd be glad to have any information about him.
Although undoubtedly the least talented philosopher of that fabulous group, I still feel honored to be among them and to have had Robert Wolff as my tutor. And, yes, I still have my copy of 'Mind and the World Order'on my shelf.
Danny Klein '61
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