What with taking my wife to occupational therapy and physical therapy sessions, dealing with my own Parkinson’s disease, navigating the complexities of the pandemic, and appearing in Canada or Oregon as a guest lecturer, I am afraid I have let the comments section slide by me even though there have been several comments to which I wanted to respond. So what I will do here is just go through the comments for the last week or more and try to pick up, one after the other, those that call for some response.
Here we go in no particular order:
Someone masquerading behind the elegant nom de blog “Marcel Proust” asks: “Is this a
situation in which it is better to live on one's knees than to die on one's
feet (h/t La
Pasionara) because of the risk of nuclear annihilation?” This is an extremely complicated and
difficult matter and I am limited severely by my lack of useful inside
information. Are there back channel contacts between senior US and Russian
military commanders that could conceivably lead to Putin being deposed in a
palace coup? Does the US have
intelligence accurate enough to tell when the Russians are preparing to launch
a nuclear weapon and could they intercepted and shoot it down? And so forth. I
just do not know. By the way, chemical weapons, terrible as they are, are not
in any sense “weapons of mass destruction” and their use poses problems of a
totally different sort from the use of nuclear weapons.
Tony Couture: thank
you for the long and informative comment about Moodles. This is something with which I am completely
unfamiliar and it sounds extraordinarily time-consuming for you. I will have to
look into it.
Barney, great to hear from you. By the way, folks, because
my big sister Barbara was called “Bobs” before I was even born, I was always “Rob”
in the family. Even if he did not give his whole name, that is the giveaway
that Barney is my cousin.
John Rapko, I am very touched by your offer to send me a
copy of Geuss’s book when it comes out. Ray
was a student at Columbia when I was teaching there in the later 60s but I do
not think he ever took a course with me. Those who knew him had only the
highest opinion of him, I recall.
3 comments:
I’m several days late with this, but I can’t resist responding to your post of last week about taking stock of your life. I may have told this story on here before, but it bears repeating. I was privileged to share in one of the highlights you cited in your life: the course on Kant’s first Critique in 1960. After you had led us through the main argument, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth on our part and much very hard work on your part, you ended the final class by saying it had been a privilege to study with us the greatest philosophy book ever written. Then you scurried out of the room. We all sprang to our feet and started applauding wildly, and we kept applauding, and we kept applauding, even after we wondered why, since you weren’t even there to hear us. I’m glad it was one of the highlights of your career, Bob. It certainly was for many of us.
Mr. Cathcart,
What a glorious story! Worthy of a movie. I now believe Dr. Wolff is a Kantian rock star.
Tom, how wonderful of you to recall that moment. What was especially remarkable for me was this: the course met regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays but in those two days I could not cover my complete analysis of the central argument of the critique and so I called the class for a special meeting on Saturday and everyone showed up! I cannot emphasize how remarkable it was at Harvard in those days to have anybody show up for class on Saturday. I just started talking and kept going well past the hour that was allotted until I had finished my analysis. It is funny. It was one of the very first courses I ever taught and in fact the first philosophy course I ever taught. I recall thinking at the time that this would be the high point of my teaching career, even though it came at the very beginning. I am glad I had the good sense to know how wonderful you all were at that moment.
By the way, I gave the course a second time the next semester and it was in that second version that people like Thomas Nagel took it. But it was the first iteration with mostly undergraduates that was a really memorable moment for me.
Many of you will know Tom Cathcart from his book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar, Which I think sold more copies than any of mine :).
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