The extremely knowledgeable responses to my clueless post about the word “doula” put me in mind of my favorite memory of the Academy. Back in the early 80s when I had moved to the Boston area so that my first wife could take up a professorship at MIT, I attended a simply lovely series of events at Boston University hosted by something called The Colloquium for the History and Philosophy of Science. The Colloquium was run by two members of the philosophy department, Bob Cohen and Marx Wartofsky. Bob and Marx had the broadest conceivable notion of what counted as the history and philosophy of science so the topics of the periodic colloquia were as diverse as could be imagined. If you got to be one of the favored insiders, which I did after a bit, you were invited to a dinner for the evening speaker with maybe 20 or 30 attendees. It was, I thought, far and away the most perfect embodiment of the ideal of the Academy that I had ever encountered.
One of the odd and rather magical features of the events was that no matter how arcane the topic, somehow there would show up to the talk someone who was an expert on it and could ask penetrating questions far above the paygrade of the rest of us. The most memorable example of this quirk was an evening devoted to a gruesome lecture on the practices of the ancient Aztecs delivered by a professor from the University of Massachusetts medical school in Worcester. (The Aztecs, according to this chap, had the practice of skinning their victims alive and then wearing the skin as clothing!) We all sat there trying hard not to barf and wondering what on earth anybody could ask to create the simulacrum of a conversation once the talk ended.
Not to worry! Sure
enough, when Bob called for questions a young man rose from the back of the
audience and announced that he was in fact a descendent of the Aztecs. He then
proceeded to ask a series of hostile questions that amused the rest of us no
end while getting us off the hook.
Sometimes I think that without actually intending to I have
re-created an Internet version of the colloquium that Bob and Marx headed up
for so many years.
2 comments:
Regarding hostile reactions to a guest speaker’s presentation, I have in past comments referred to the book “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” which recounts an exchange between Ludwig Wittgentstein and Karl Popper, who was an invited guest speaker to one of the regular philosophy symposiums which were conducted at Cambridge. Popper gave his presentation in October, 1944, in which he maintained that there were genuine philosophical issues which required analysis. At the conclusion of Popper’s lecture, Wittgentstein, who had been nervously playing with a poker from the room’s fireplace, dismissed all of the issues which Popper had offered as genuine philosophical problems, purportedly pointed the poker at Popper (witnesses who attended the seminar differ regarding the actual events) and asked him to identify a genuine moral rule. Popper responded, “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” Wittgentstein reportedly dropped the poker and left the room in a pique.
The balance of the book reviews various versions of what occurred as reported by some of the philosophy graduate students who were in attendance, many of whom became prominent philosophy professors in their own right, and discusses the biographical backgrounds of both Wittgenstein and Popper, as well as summarizing their incompatible views on philosophy.
Dear Prof. Wolff, I think I first came across references to the writings of Marx Wartofsky about 40 years ago in Paul Feyerabend's writings. Along with his book on Feuerbach, there's a volume of Wartofsky's essays that seems to me both fertile and forgotten. I've occasionally wondered what sort of person he was (I know nothing about him), as his writings seem so intelligent and independent-minded. I'd love to read here your reminiscences of Wartofsky and/or more accounts of his and Cohen's Colloquium.
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