THIS AND THAT

Apropos Nozick's book, anyone interested can take a look at my article on it which I believe is archived at box.net.  Warren Goldfarb knew Quine infinitely better than I did but perhaps I can add one curious personal story that gives some insight not into his politics but into the way he viewed the world.  I first studied with Quine in 1950. This was only a few years after the end of World War II, when London was still repairing itself from the blitz and Berlin was still divided into several zones. Walking across Harvard Yard one day, I ran into Quine talking with a few people and stopped to listen. Quine was describing a recent trip to Germany which had taken him, among other places, to one of the death camps. He was describing the extraordinary efficiency with which the Germans exterminated millions of Jews. He was not in any way at all approving of this monstrous act but it was obvious that he was fascinated simply by the arrangements that made the efficiency possible. Quine, in my experience, was a charming, witty, and personally quite conscientious man – for example, in that time, every aspiring graduate student looking for a job wanted a letter of recommendation from Quine, even though only a handful of them had been in any real sense his students. Without complaining, Quine wrote letter after letter for them, You doing the best for them that he could. But he was in an odd way, despite his charm, rather cold and his intellectual fascination with the technical arrangements of the death camps was a rather chilling example of this. Still and all, I liked him enormously and with the sole exception of C. I. Lewis, he had a more powerful influence on my philosophical development than any of my other professors.

Bob Nozick, politics to one side, was a delight, bright, charming, engaging in all ways.  Since I am an inveterate storyteller I will tell a personal story about Bob. In the 1980s, I was living in Belmont so that my first wife could take up a professorship at MIT. My sons went to Belmont high school, in front of which there was a large semicircular driveway where parents could drop off their kids at school. During the time that I lived in Massachusetts, I had a vanity plate which read I KANT.  I also had a bumper sticker that read "Question Authority."  (Because of my little book on anarchism I always felt a certain proprietary pride about that bumper sticker.) One day, after I had dropped my boys at the high school I was starting to drive away when somebody behind me honked his horn. When I stopped, Bob came running up (he also had a child at Belmont high) and when he got to my open window he said hello and then he said with great delight "as soon as I saw the license plate and the bumper sticker I knew it had to be you!" Bob died much, much too early but my older son Patrick, who did his last two years at Harvard, had the great fortune of studying with him shortly before he passed away. His death really saddened me.