MEMOIR -- SECOND INSTALLMENT

My biggest academic problem that first year, far more pressing than covering two thousand years of European history, was deciding what to call my new colleagues, who had for the past eight years been my professors. I couldn't see myself addressing Quine as "Van" and Aiken as "Henry." The department secretary, Ruth Allen, who had been with the department longer than all but the oldest senior professors, was casually familiar with the faculty, but her situation was the inverse of mine. She had met them when they were graduate students, and was not about to become deferentially formal just because they had been jumped up to professor status. I solved the problem for a long while by simply not addressing them directly at all, which made for some rather abrupt conversational openers. Finally, during a year when White was at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, he asked me in a letter to call him "Morty." I never did call Demos "Raphael." He was by that time unimaginably old - indeed, he must have been ten years younger than I am now.

Even though I was now earning an actual salary, complete with medical coverage and payments into the TIAA/CREF pension plan, I still could use some extra money, so I signed up to serve as a Freshman Advisor. One of my very first advisees was a pleasant young man who had attended the same mid-western high school as the logic phenom Saul Kripke. My advisee was no trouble at all, but Saul was a handful. He was, as we would say today, socially challenged, taking up a good deal of the time of the committee of House Senior Tutors who met regularly to deal with student problems. Marshall Cohen ran into one of the Senior Tutors who told of a long meeting they had just suffered through trying to sort out Saul's difficulties with a roommate. Marshall asked whether the Senior Tutors didn't resent having to spend so much time dealing with a Freshman, but his friend replied that he had been a member of the ground crew of a B-17 during the war. Each day, he said, as the B-17 limped back to base from a bombing mission, all shot up, his crew would run out onto the field and do whatever spot repairs they could, so that the bomber could go up the next day on another raid. "That is what we are doing," he said. "Our job is to get Saul back up in the air so that he can continue flying." That remark has stayed with me through the years as the epitome of dedicated teaching.

The next summer, my advisee invited me to dinner at his apartment, where he had taken up light housekeeping with a lovely Radcliffe girl. Saul was there as well. Saul's father was a Conservative Rabbi, and Saul had had a serious Jewish upbringing. As he talked, he davaned, which is to say he rocked back and forth vigorously. As he talked and davaned he ate, gesturing spastically, and as he talked and davaned and ate and gestured, his food scattered all over the table, as if to illustrate the law of entropy. With gentle understanding, the young Radcliffe student patiently swept the peas up from the table top and put them back on Saul's plate, where they stayed for a bit before being restrewn.

I have often wondered whether Saul, brilliant though he undoubtedly was, ever understood how much slack everyone was cutting him, from Quine on down. Somehow, I think not.

For the most part, I went my own way in the department. Harvard professors don't really advance much beyond what is called in child development books "parallel play." No one attends anyone else's lectures, of course, and there is precious little socializing. When they encounter one another on campus, they resemble the dukes and counts at the medieval court of Burgundy, glorious and richly appointed and very formal. Each full professor proceeds in stately fashion, preceded like Cyrano's nose by his vita, and trailing in his wake several Assistant Professors who exhibit the appropriate submissive body language.

But every so often, when things had so piled up that it was unavoidable, we had department meetings. I attended these with great anticipation, seized by what can only be described as a sublimated academic form of primal scene scopophilia, which is the term psychoanalysts use for the obsessive desire to see one's parents making love.

At almost the first meeting I attended, a dispute broke out between Quine and Aiken. The year before, apparently, one of Quine=s doctoral student working jointly in Mathematics and Philosophy had been permitted to substitute one of the Mathematics qualifying examinations for the Preliminary Exam on Ethics. Now one of Aiken's students, working jointly in Philosophy and Art History, wanted to substitute an Art History exam for the Logic Prelim. Quine said flatly that it was out of the question. Aiken protested that by parity of reason [ordinarily a winning move in philosophical arguments] he should be allowed to make the substitution. Quine was adamant. Finally Aiken turned to Quine and said, "All right, Ledge, why not? What is the difference between Ethics and Logic." "The answer is simple," Quine replied. "Ethics is easy and Logic is hard." Aiken was apoplectic but the substitution was disallowed.

MEMOIR FOURTH INSTALLMENT

The Harvard Department was struggling with a problem that seemed to grow worse with each passing year. Their very best students were simply not finishing the degree. Some of them, like Marshall Cohen and Bert Dreben, took the appointment to the Society of Fellows as an excuse for not actually writing a doctoral dissertation, much as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and McGeorge Bundy had done in earlier years. But this didn't always work out for others as it had for them. Stanley Cavell had gone off after his Junior Fellowship to teach at the University of California, and out there, state law required the Ph. D. for anyone promoted to a tenured position. Thompson Clark was in the same boat, and there were a number of other top students who just seemed unable to finish up. This, I realized, was what had prompted Firth's little chalk talk about rising abilities and soaring expectations. The problem was becoming an embarrassment to Quine and White, who were the dissertation directors of these non-performers, and a source of growing irritation to Williams, Aiken, and others whose best students were passed over for the coveted Junior Fellowships as well as for junior positions in the department, despite getting their degrees. Steve Barker was one case in point. He had done his work with Williams, who was not amused to see Steve passed over when Cavell and Cohen and Dreben were given the juiciest plums Harvard had to offer.

The whole matter came to a head in my second year as an Instructor - 1959-60. At long last, Tom Clark sent in a dissertation. Tom was considered by some to be one of the best students the department had ever enrolled, and the dissertation had been awaited eagerly for years. Morty White had directed it, but he was away at the Princeton Institute, so Quine and Williams were constituted as the committee. The dissertation was on perception. This is a standard topic in the empiricist theory of knowledge, but in a rather odd fashion, Tom had drawn into the text little circles colored orange with crayon as examples of the surface of an orange. Philosophy dissertations were not known by and large for full-color illustrations.

At the next meeting, Quine and Williams gave their opinions. Williams thought it had some good points, but also some problems. Quine said it was flatly unacceptable and should be rejected. We were all stunned. Everyone had simply assumed that a dissertation by Tom Clark would be an occasion for celebration. Williams remonstrated, but Quine stood firm. What to do?

It was finally decided that the entire department would read the dissertation, and sit as a committee of the whole. There were only two people let off the hook. I was excused because I was only an Instructor, and not senior enough to bear so heavy a burden. Jack Rawls was also out, because he was only visiting from M. I. T., and would not actually join the department as a professor until two years later.

By the time we met next to decide the matter, White had weighed in with a letter strongly supporting the dissertation, but he wasn't there to take part in the discussion, a fact that had the effect of side-lining him. Quine and Williams had not changed their minds, but everyone else had an opinion and wanted to express it. Clark's principal defender, in White's absence, was his good friend Marshall Cohen, now an Assistant Professor of General Education and Philosophy. As the debate proceeded, things started to look bad for Clark. Quine was very persuasive, and since he was in the position of defending the most rigorous possible standards, he had the high ground.

Finally, in a moment of inspiration born of desperation, Cohen won over the waverers by arguing that Tom's dissertation ought to be accepted out of fairness because it was not as bad as the worst dissertation the department had ever approved. This was certainly true, and enough votes were swung to give Clark the doctorate.

Stanley Cavell also finally finished up with an impressive Wittgensteinian thesis called "Must We Mean What We Say," later published by Cambridge University Press. Stanley had been a Junior Fellow also, having come to Harvard via Juilliard and UCLA, if I remember correctly. He was very much a presence during the years I knew him in Cambridge, a burly, balding man with blond hair whose aura seemed to fill a good deal more space than his mere body. All of us looked forward with a slightly malicious anticipation to the moment when he and Rogers Albritton would first meet. They were equally brilliant, equally tortured and complicated, equally incapable of adopting or stating a philosophical position straight out, without doubling back on it, viewing it from an ironic distance, undercutting it, and then reaffirming it. But it was as though Rogers was Stanley turned inside out. The more Stanley expanded to fill all the available ego space, the more Rogers shrank into himself. It was a little as though Walt Whitman were to encounter Emily Dickinson.

The actual meeting was a bit of a letdown. I think they instantaneously recognized that neither would get a superior handhold on the other, and much in the manner of two chess grandmasters who find themselves in an opening that offers little opportunity for a win, they settled quickly for a draw.

Stanley and I got along, I guess, but I didn't like him. I was very young, very enthusiastic, desperately earnest. Stanley was, or at least affected to be, world-weary, ironical, and disillusioned. Once during my first graduate year, I stayed up all Saturday night thinking about the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, which had first been articulated in that fashion by Kant and had recently been called into question by Quine. By dawn, I thought I had achieved a breakthrough, and ran down to Adams House, where Stanley was having a languid Sunday breakfast with John Hollander. I burst into the dining hall, rushed up to their table, and with barely a "hello" started laying out my ideas. Stanley put up his hand, and drawled, "Please. Not before breakfast."

My sole duties in the Department were to handle the surge of tutorials mandated by Harvard's redefinition of its undergraduates. I taught Sophomore group tutorial and Junior group tutorial, and directed senior honors theses. Alhough some of the students were very, very bright, and I have actually stayed in touch with a few up to the present day, I did not find the tutorial mode of teaching to my liking. Even then, I was something of a performer, and preferred standing in front of a full classroom.

It is worth mentioning, for the sake of the historical record, that in the academic year 1959-60, I had a slender, retiring young man in my Junior tutorial class who has gone on to achieve some prominence. David Souter was very smart, and my notes indicate that he did a quite commendable paper on C. I. Lewis' Mind and the World Order. The next year, I wrote a letter for David in support of his candidacy for a Rhodes Scholarship, which I believe he won. America was for a long time dependent on him to stand in the way of the egregious excesses of the Bush Administration and its appalling Attorney-General. I like to imagine that I had some small part in preparing him for that challenge.

Many years later, when Souter was elevated to the high court, he gave a speech in which he said, rather unexpectedly, that he would rather be lecturing on Proust. I was at that time the Director of a small humanities institute at the University of Massachusetts, so I wrote to him as his old tutor and invited him to give a lecture for us. I told him I hadn't any idea what the going honorarium was for a Supreme Court Justice, but I thought we could certainly send a cord of firewood to his Vermont home. He declined, and said mildly that a cobbler should stick to his last. Somehow, the forty years didn't seem to have changed him.

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.

MORNING MAUNDERINGS

During my walk this morning, I found myself thinking back many decades to my undergraduate days and the effect on me of studying, when I was so young, with Willard van Orman Quine.  I have already told a number of stories about Quine in my Autobiography, so I shan't rehearse them here, but as I neared the end of my walk, I recalled the great opening paragraph of Quine's famous essay, "On What There Is," whose laconic style so perfectly captured Quine's character.  For those of you who do not know the essay, here it is:

"A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity.  It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?'  It can be answered, moreover, in a word -- 'Everything' -- and everyone will accept this answer as true.  However, this is merely to say that there is what there is.  There remains room for disagreement over cases, and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries." 

I wonder sometimes whether I was not influenced, as a young undergraduate, by this bare style in my own writing.  Later in the same essay, when he is discussing the views of an imaginary philosopher whom he calls "Wyman,"  [to contrast him with Mr. X], Quine says that Wyman's "over-populated universe" [which has in it possible entities as well as actual entities] "offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes."

This naturally reminded me of Eric Erickson's fascinating observation that people have styles in dreaming -- some of us always have Technicolor dreams stuffed full of images and events, while others have spare Black and White dreams, regardless of the meaning of the dreams.

The Quine opening paragraph also reminded me of other striking opening lines -- "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  And of course the most famous first line in all literature:  "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

My mind, like that of Tristram Shandy, being prone to digression, I soon found myself thinking of favorite lines from movies, and since we leave in just seven days for Paris, I thought quite naturally of Casablanca.  Casablanca offers not one but three immortal lines along with a fourth that does not actually appear in the movie.  "We'll always have Paris" is the signature line of the movie, but "Round up the usual suspects" runs a close second, giving us the name of the great Kevin Spacey movie.  And then, of course, there is the last line of the movie, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."  The line that does not actually appear is "Play it again, Sam."

Humphrey Bogart's closing remark to Claude Raines reminded me of my personal favorite last line of any movie.  It comes from Men in Black.  Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith have just defeated a giant intergalactic cockroach, played with brilliance in an over-the-top performance by Vincent D'Onofrio.  Jones and Smith are getting ready to leave Flushing Meadow with Smith's new love interest and future Woman in Black Linda Fiorentino when a call comes in of trouble with some planet somewhere.  Jones says, "Call Dennis Rodman."  Fiorentino asks, "Is he from there?" and when Jones says yes, Fiorentino delivers the great throwaway last line:  "Not much of a disguise."

Tha-tha-that's all folks.

A NOTE ON DREAMING

The responses to my observations about anxiety dreams got me thinking about Willard Van Orman Quine, Erik Erikson, and Calypso.  What, you might ask, could the connection possibly be?  It is like this:

Erikson, somewhere [I think in Childhood and Society], observes that people have styles in dreaming.  Some people always dream in Technicolor, others dream in Black and White.  Some folks have cluttered dreams, filled with all manner of dream elements, as psychoanalysts call them;  others have very spare dreams, with only a few elements.  This does seem to be a matter of style -- those who dream in Technicolor, for example, will do so whether the feeling tone of the dream is anxiety, erotic desire, anger, or simple curiosity.

Inasmuch as I graduated from Harvard in 1953 after taking one undergraduate and two graduate logic courses with Quine, I naturally was reminded by Erikson's observation of a line in Quine's elegant little collection, From a Logical Point of View, which was published that year.  In the lead essay, "On What There Is," Quine describes himself at one point as having a "taste for desert landscapes" -- a fact, he suggests, that inclines him to spare ontologies.

Quine, all of us students knew, had rather eclectic cultural tastes, and so it was obvious where he had found the title for his book.  The source was a Calypso song made popular by the young Harry Belafonte whose refrain is "So from a logical point of view/Always marry a woman uglier than you."  I recall thinking that this was a really nifty choice of a title.

SELF-JUSTIFYING POSTSCRIPT

In the Fall of 1951 [yes, really sixty-four years ago -- that is not a typo] I took Willard van Orman Quine's graduate Math 280 course at Harvard, "Mathematical Logic."  We used as a text his book by the same name.  One of the other undergraduates in the course was Ralph Krause, a very smart young man.  Ralph found an error in the book and called it to Quine's attention.  Quine was very grateful, and corrected it in the next edition with a footnote acknowledgement to Krause.

Now, when it comes to all things formal, I am not fit to carry Quine's briefcase, and that is not modesty or hyperbole, just the plain truth.  So I figure, if it can happen to Quine ...

REFLECTIONS FROM A FUDDY DUDDY

I have now had several experiences with zoom teaching and as I have indicated, I do not like it.  But perhaps I am simply exhibiting my age and my ungetoverable mid-20^th century limitations.  Are the zoom students missing something?  Inasmuch as I do not actually exchanged bodily fluids with any of my students, perhaps not. 

Well, I wondered, can I get some insight into the matter by reflecting on whether there is anything I myself would have lost by pursuing my own education online, had that been an option seventy years ago?  Assuming a reasonably smoothly functioning capability for questions and answers, what, if anything at all, did I gain by actually being in the same room with my professors?

A great deal, I concluded, but not in any ordinary informational sense.  From Harry Austryn Wolfson’s books and zoomed lectures, I could have learned some slight sliver of what he knew about the tradition of philosophical debates from Plato to Spinoza, including the great Arabic thinkers, but I would have missed something not found on the printed page or in my copious lecture notes.  In my memory, that missing element is captured in a moment from his Spinoza course in the spring of 1952.  Wolfson had decided to try a new-fangled mode of instruction he had heard his colleagues talking about – class discussion.   So he put a question to the class:  Was Spinoza an atheist?  As the graduate students pitched in, eager to distinguish themselves [we undergraduates sat silently], Wolfson grew visibly more distressed.  Finally, he called the discussion to a halt.  It seemed that when he asked such a question, he meant “What were contemporary 17^th century Dutch opinions on the matter?” and when he realized that none of us had read any 17^th century Dutch authors [in the original, needless to say] he decided we did not know enough to have a discussion, so he went back to lecturing.  It is an amusing story, but for me it was more.  It was a moment that taught me what it meant truly to be a scholar, and I have carried it with me for a lifetime.  That is why I always make it clear that I am not a scholar, whatever others may imagine.

Another memory from that same semester comes to mind.  I was taking Willard Van Orman Quine’s seminar on mathematical logic, in which we students were called on to make class presentations.  One evening, a graduate student launched into an exposition of his semester project, complete with several blackboards covered with symbols, and about twenty minutes into his spiel, he got hopelessly tangled up.  Something was wrong with what he had put on the board.  Quine let him struggle for several minutes and then interrupted, saying “All right, all right, just go on with it.”  As the hapless young man soldiered on, Quine sat sideways in his wooden armchair, his legs draped over one arm, seemingly listening intently.  Fifteen minutes later, he stopped the student, went to the board, and sorted out the logical confusion that had brought the exposition to a halt.  It was a spontaneous display of the quickness and power of Quine’s mind, and I have never forgotten it.  If I had merely read his elegant books and listened to his rather formal and stilted lectures, I never would have had that insight into his mind.

I would imagine every one of us has his or her own memories of this sort.  Sometimes, the old ways really are best.

SOME RESPONSES

Little by little, my life is disappearing into boxes.  It is very strange.  Meanwhile, let me respond to two questions in the comments section of this blog.

First, Paul asks:  “Curious to know if, as a 19 year old, you were sympathetic to Quine's approach to the problem in 'Two Dogmas'.”

Quine’s famous essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” was published in 1951, during my first year at Harvard.  Two years later, Quine included it in a book of essays, called, with tongue in cheek, From a Logical Point of View [part of the refrain of a Calypso song popular at the time – Quine had a rather wry sense of humor.]  I read the essay and then the whole book, but I confess that I was not taken with his line on the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments.  I was much more powerfully impressed with Kant, which I suppose is hardly surprising.

Jerry Fresia asks, a propos this assertion:  “how could there ever be a de jure authority that didn't necessarily undermine the autonomy of the people subject to it?”, what about “the authority of teachers in classrooms, for one, of parents with their kids, for another.....??”

There are two different questions here, and they require quite different answers, one rather simple, the other quite complex.  Simple first.  Teachers do not have authority in classrooms on any plausible vision of education with which I am familiar [I leave to one side catechism classes.]   They have the power to give grades, of course, and they are, we may hope, authorities on the subjects they teach.   But an authority, in that sense, is someone who knows a great deal about a subject and has sufficiently demonstrated that knowledge to make it reasonable to come to him or her for information or guidance in the process of education.  However, at no time do students have a moral obligation to do as such authorities say, or to believe what they say, in contravention of their independent judgment as students.  We are all familiar with the phenomenon of disagreements among people considered authorities on a subject, and it is of course, our responsibility, as autonomous agents, to weigh their statements and eventually decide where the truth is more likely to lie.  This is difficult, not to say life threatening, when the experts are, let us say, oncologists or brain surgeons, but what are we doing when we seek a second opinion if not exercising our obligation to be autonomous?

The relation of parents to children is much more complex.  Here we see most poignantly the logical conflict [and life conflict] between the classical assumption, found in social contract theory and elsewhere, that the moral sphere is one of fully mature, rational agents, and the manifest fact that we are all at one stage or another of the life cycle of birth, childhood, adulthood, maturity, and old age.  The simple reply to Jerry’s question is that parents never have de jure moral authority over their children.  When the children are too young and immature to be and act as fully rational moral agents, the parents are their guardians, charged morally with bringing them to the point at which they can function as fully developed moral agents.  At that point, the children become autonomous.  In effect, if the children are capable of deferring to the authority of the parents, then they are moral agents and ought not to do so.  If they are not so capable, then they cannot, and therefore do not and ought not.

When does the child become an autonomous agent, hence an adult and no longer bound to obey his or her parents?  Ah well, that is the subject of half of the great literature ever written and all of the anguish that parents experience.  About that, I have no special wisdom to offer.  Just the consolation to tormented parents that whatever they do, it is sure to be wrong,

I HOPE QUINE WOULD BE PROUD OF ME

 70 years ago at just about this time in September, I packed my few belongings, went to Grand Central Station, took the shore line to South Station in Boston, took the T to Harvard Square, walked across Mass. Avenue to Harvard Yard and began my education as a freshman at Harvard. The very first course I took was Philosophy 140, Willard Van Orman Quine’s course on symbolic logic, and almost the first thing I learned from Quine, something hammered into me so that I would never forget it, was the distinction between use and mention. Although I started out my life as a logic student, I soon took the path of the Rake’s progress first to the history of philosophy, then to social and political philosophy, and then – Lord help me – to such things beyond the pale as Marx’s economics and even Afro-American studies. So I didn’t have much professional use for the distinction between use and mention, but along the way I became addicted to crossword puzzles and there I found repeatedly that a clear grasp of that distinction is absolutely essential.

 

For almost 6 months now I have been doing the New York Times crossword puzzle online, a choice I made because my handwriting has gotten so bad that I can scarcely read what I write. One of the side benefits of doing the puzzle that way is that the app keeps track of how I do, telling me for each day of the week my average speed and my best speed of solution. As those of you will know who are also addicted to the Times puzzle, Mondays are the easiest of the week, but sometimes they have a little gimmick in them and today that gimmick was three long across solutions in which the letters “itti” appear in sequence. The solution to another long across clue was “have it both ways.” Not have “it” both ways, which is what a Quine student would expect but simply “have it both ways.” This deliberate confusion of use and mention is one of the standard tropes in crossword puzzle clues and every time it comes up I get a slight frisson of pleasure and a sense that I am a boy once again taking Philosophy 140.

COMMENTS ON COMMENTS

My recent posts have provoked a stream of quite interesting comments, which as yet I have not responded to, so rather than reply in the comments section, I have decided to write an omnium gatherum post in which I try to address some of the many questions that have been raised.

Let me begin with two comments [or rather three, actually], by Andrew Blais and Warren Goldfarb, that take me back quite a way to my early days as student and young Instructor, in the 1950's and early 1960's.  Andrew Blais asks me some pointed questions about my relation to Quine's nominalism and whether it is in any way related to my oft-expressed belief that we must struggle to translate metaphors into arguments if we are to make them clear.  My initial reaction to this question was that I had never been much interested in the Nominalism-Platonism debate and thought that it had no impact at all on my thinking about Philosophy.  But then I recalled Martin Jay's wonderful account in The Dialectical Imagination of his interviews with the surviving members of the Frankfurt School for Social Research.  Jay asked some of the leading members of the School, who had sought refuge in America from Nazism [many at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan], what significance there might be in the fact that almost all of them were upper middle class assimilated German Jews.  These were folks -- Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, et al. -- who were capable of discerning deep ideological resonances and complexities in the unlikeliest artifacts of popular culture, and yet they all brushed the question aside and said there was no significance to it at all.

Now, I studied with Quine and Goodman when I was not yet eighteen years old.  How plausible is it that I was blithely unaffected by the philosophical issue that at that time completely absorbed them?  Good grief, my first serious college term paper, written my Freshman year, was a "Calculus of Size" using Nelson Goodman's nominalist Logic of Individuals as it was set forth in his first book, The Structure of Appearance.  Would I believe Aristotle if he said he had been uninfluenced by studying with Plato?  Or Marx, if he said that although Hegel might have been in the air in Berlin, he had not inhaled?

Quine was meticulous about the niceties of formal logic in a way that he thought mathematicians were not.  I imbibed the distinction between use and mention with my mother's milk, as it were.  So, if I may view myself objectively, it seems indisputable that I was influenced by whatever Quine, Goodman, and certain other members of the Harvard Philosophy Department [most notably C. I. Lewis] thought were the important philosophical questions.  I can recall vividly staying up all night puzzling over the analytic/synthetic distinction and rushing into the Adams House dining room on Sunday morning to tell Stanley Cavell what I had discovered, only to be dismissed by Stanley and his guest, poet John Hollander, with the languid remark, "Please, not before breakfast."

There can be no doubt that my conception of clarity comes directly from that handful of analytic philosophers with whom I studied as a boy, even if the formal issue of nominalism was never on my mind.

Blais goes on to ask, "Why is it that all the great philosophers (the ones that you have explicated, for example) have all left posterity complicated argumentative structures that rest on metaphors that need so much effort to explain?"  I think I know the answer to that one.  The very greatest philosophers are never content with neat, precise superficial explications of reasonably transparent questions.  They are constantly struggling to put into words insights they have, sometimes only dimly, into very deep and complex questions, the articulation of which forces them beyond whatever is the received and widely understood state of the art when they are working.  They are unwilling to let go of those insights, even if they are not yet able to state them clearly.  So they grasp at metaphorical articulations that keep alive as much as possible of the insights.  Sometimes they are then able to restate those insights clearly and precisely, but often it is left to us, coming after them, to do that work.  But if they are so brilliant, why can they not do this themselves?  I will answer with a metaphor.  When I was young, the four minute mile was the unattainable goal of every world-class long distance runner.  Finally, in 1954 [as I was preparing to take the famously formidable Prelims in the Harvard Philosophy Department] Roger Bannister broke the four minute barrier in a race at Oxford University.  Pretty soon, all the great runners were running sub-four minute miles, and these days good high school runners can do it.  But until John Bannister did it, it seemed impossible.

Which, by a process of Shandean association, brings me to Warren Goldfarb's interesting response to my facetious post about first and last lines.  Professor Goldfarb writes that "in the late 1950s J.L. Austin and my late colleague Roderick Firth were planning a book of opposing views in epistemology that they hoped to title Price and Prejudice (after H.H. Price, the stalwart of English sense-data theory)."   The late 1950's is just when I was writing my doctoral dissertation under Firth's direction and teaching in the Department as an Instructor when Firth was acting as Chair.   I never heard about the plan for a book with Austin, but I can easily imagine it.  Roderick Firth was a wonderful man -- ramrod straight, slender, a man of impeccable moral character, with a charming little smile flirting with the edges of his mouth.  I heard that as a Quaker he "witnessed" during the Viet Nam War by attending public demonstrations.  It was Firth who gave me an invaluable little piece of advice on writing my dissertation.  He put a pair of x and y axes on the board and then drew two lines -- a straight line rising slowly from the origin, and an arc curving up from the origin farther and farther above the straight line.  "The straight line is your ability to write a good dissertation, rising slowly as time passes," he said.  "The curved line represents the sort of dissertation you think you should write, and as time passes and you do not finish, it rises faster and faster.  The sooner you finish, the smaller the gap will be between the dissertation you do write and the dissertation you think you should write."  It was the best advice I ever received, and I responded by writing the entire dissertation, from the time I chose the topic until the day I handed it in, in eighteen months.

My first year as a graduate student, I took a reading course with Firth.  I read Hastings Rashdall's Theory of Good and Evil and Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics and Collingwood and Moore and Ross and Ewing and lord knows what else.  I am sure I am a better person for it all, but I found it hopelessly boring.  I actually went off to Europe for my wanderjahr thinking I would write a dissertation on ethics, but by the time I got home, I had given that up and turned instead to Kant and Hume.  Whew!  Close call.

Professor Goldfarb mentions H. H. Price.  How that brings back memories!  Price's book, Hume's Theory of the External World, now long forgotten I am sure, had an enormous impact on me during the time when I was so deeply engaged with the Treatise.  Those were the days when Oxford and Cambridge were the Promised Land to American philosophers.  It is all associated in my mind with those severe black volumes that Oxford University Press put out, many of which still grace my shelves here in Chapel Hill.

Which  brings me to Andrew Levine, my old student, now retired [I believe.]  I have not yet gotten around to reading Andy's book on Marx, which I shall, so I must hold serious comment for the moment, but I could not let his name pass without noting that for a brief moment [his "fifteen minutes of fame," pace Andy Warhol], he was known on television as Professor Backwards because of his bizarre ability [demonstrated, if I remember correctly, on the Johnny Carson Show] to repeat what someone says backwards -- not word by word, but phoneme by phoneme, so that it sounds like what a person who does not speak Chinese thinks Chinese sounds like.

Well, I think that is enough, though it only scratches the surface of the interesting comments that have popped up lately.  Thank you all and keep them coming.

A BRIEF MEMOIR, TO REFRESH US

Well, right on cue, the courts stopped Trump from doing something he thought he had succeeded in doing.  We will see how this plays out.  Needless to say, I am watching closely, but I have virtually nothing to add to the commentary you all have read, some of it by people genuinely knowledgeable about Constitutional Law.  Accordingly, I am going to take my own advice and stay cool.  Several of you have asked questions about Herbert Marcuse, and so I thought as a diversion I would write today about my memories of him.  This will not be a theoretical critique of his work, Lord knows, but a mixture of fairly elementary observations and personal stories.  Think of it, if you will, as that little dish of sherbet upscale restaurants offer between courses to cleanse the palate.  Much of what I say here can be found in my autobiography.  However, long experience has taught me not to assume that the world has read that compelling work.

I first met Herbert Marcuse in the fall of 1960, when I was 26 and he was 62.  I was at the time co-teaching a sophomore level tutorial with Barrington Moore Jr. in a new program I headed at Harvard called Social Studies.  Marcuse was teaching at Brandeis University.  He and Moore had become close friends during World War II while both were working in DC at the OSS, precursor to the CIA.   Moore was on the Russian Desk and Marcuse was on the German Desk.  [Parenthetically, many of the leading social scientists in the U. S. of all political stripes worked at the OSS during the war, and after the war, despite any political differences they might have had, they remained fast friends.]

Moore came from old New England money.  He was a direct descendent of Clement Clark Moore, of “T’was the night before Christmas” fame, and his grandfather had been the Commodore of the New York Yacht Club.  Barry spent the summers on his boat off the Massachusetts coast with his wife, Betty, whom he had met at OSS, and his winter vacations skiing.  His proudest boast was that he had once been asked to join the Alta Ski Patrol.  He was tall and thin, and his contempt for bourgeois capitalist society was as much aristocratic as radical in origins.  Barry’s home at Harvard was the Russian Research Institute because he refused to join the Social Relations Department, home of Talcott Parsons.

Barry decided that I should meet Herbert, so he and Betty invited me and my girlfriend [we still talked that way then] to dinner at their home in a lovely residential part of Cambridge.  Herbert and his wife Inge [widow of Franz Neumann] were the other guests.

Herbert was a fleshy man with an open face, red cheeks, and a great shock of white hair.  He was rather imposing at first meeting, and had a very thick German accent.  I was almost two generations younger, very wet behind the ears, but I had one great asset that won him over.  To German intellectuals of Marcuse’s generation, Immanuel Kant was the touchstone, the font of wisdom, the Real Deal.  When Marcuse learned that this young whippersnapper was finishing his first book, on the Critique of Pure Reason, he decided I was o.k.  After dinner, while Barry watched with amusement, Marcuse and I got into an argument about philosophy.  Herbert, like many emigré intellectuals from the Frankfurt School, knew next to nothing about Analytic Philosophy and tended to confuse it with another strange American aberration, Behavioral Social Science.  At one point, Herbert launched into an attack on Willard Van Orman Quine, ridiculing Quine’s use of the phrase “The present king of France is bald” to illustrate the theory of definite descriptions.  I defended Quine, pointing out that the question he was addressing with that example was one that had also agitated a number of famous medieval philosophers.  I must have said something about my admiration for Quine’s clarity [he had been my undergraduate teacher, and I had taken four courses and graduate seminars with him before I was old enough to drive.]  Marcuse responded by saying that in philosophy, unclarity is a virtue.

Now, you must understand that Marcuse said this in a thick accent, and since it flew in the face of everything I had learned in the preceding ten years, I thought at first that I had misunderstood him.  “Did you say that unclarity in philosophy is a virtue?”  “Yes,” Marcuse replied with a puckish grin.  “You are saying that in philosophy it is a good thing not to be clear?”  “Yes,” Marcuse said again, smiling even more broadly.

At that point I concluded that I had just had dinner with a madman – a charming, learned, engaging mad man, but a madman none the less.  It was not until four years later, when Marcuse’s great work, One-Dimensional Man, was published that I discovered what he had in mind.  I think it is worth taking a moment to explain.

In the late thirties, a group of clued up social scientists descended on the Hawthorne, IL plant of the Western Electric Company to see whether their “Operational Research” could do something about labor troubles at the plant.  The complaints of the workers, they decided, were unhelpfully vague [“wages is too low,” for example, or “the bathrooms stink”] so they decided to operationalize the concerns of the workers by asking precise, clear, specific questions about their concerns, concerns which could then be addressed, one by one, in precise, helpful, operationalized fashion.  In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that the real source of the worker discontent was the deep structural exploitation definitive of capitalist economies, exploitation that affected all of the workers regardless  of the particular form in which it was manifested in each worker’s life.  One worker might have a sick child who needed medicine that his wages did not pay for; a second might need a more flexible working schedule to accommodate her family obligations; a third might have weak eyesight that interfered with the performance of her duties at the speed demanded by the bosses.  So long as the workers expressed their complaints in general, imprecise fashion, they were able to see that they had common grievances, which made it easier for them to achieve solidarity throughout the plant and strike for better wages and working conditions.  When their problems were operationalized, worker solidarity was destroyed, because it was made to seem as though they had nothing in common on which to base that solidarity.

All of which might indeed lead someone to conclude that in philosophy [a.k.a. social science] unclarity is a virtue.

Four years after this dinner party, I had moved on, from Harvard to Chicago and then to Columbia.  One day, I got a call from Barry.  Apparently, he and Herbert had gone to Arnold Tovell at Beacon Press, which had contracted to publish One-Dimensional Man, with a proposal for a little book to consist of two essays, one by Barry on objectivity in social science [he was for it] and the other a chapter by Herbert on “repressive tolerance” that had never made it into the big book.  Tovell said two essays did not make a book, you needed at least three, so Barry wanted to know whether I would like to write the third essay, something on Tolerance. 

Would I!  I was being asked to become a co-author with Barrington Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse.  I figured my name would be made.  There was one small problem – I had nothing whatsoever to say about the subject of tolerance.  To be honest, I had never thought about it.  But that was hardly an objection, so I sat down and cranked out an analysis and critique of Liberalism, which I called “Beyond Tolerance.”

We needed a title for this slender production, so Tovell called a meeting of the three of us at 25 Beacon Street, the address of the Press, to brainstorm.  We all sat around a table and fielded ideas, none of which seemed terribly appealing.  At last, Herbert, with a straight face, proposed “A Critique of Pure Tolerance.”  I was appalled.  I had recently published my first book, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity, which had received restrained but favorable reviews.  “Herbert,” I cried, “if I publish a book with that title, my name will be mud in the profession!”  “Don’t worry,” Marcuse replied with a malicious smile, “no one will read it.”

Well, Herbert was almost right.  Tovell had the brilliant idea of publishing the little book in hard cover, to get serious reviews, but sized like an old-fashioned paperback, so that it would be sold in those racks at train stations and in drug stores where paperbacks were displayed back then.  The little book had a stark black cover and looked like a black version of Mao’s Little Red Book.  Alas Tovell got it backwards.  The book sold like a hardcover, which is to say hardly at all, and was ignored by reviewers as though it was a paperback.  But then Marcuse’s big book came out just as the “60’s were revving up.  It went viral overseas when Daniel Cohn-Bendit read the French translation and Rudi Dutschke [“Red Rudi”] read it in German.  Marcuse was hot, so Tovell brought out a new edition of A Critique of Pure Tolerance, this time in standard hard and soft covers, and it took off.  That first year, the new edition sold 26,000 copies.

Some years later, after I had married my “girlfriend,” fathered two sons, and moved to Northampton to teach at UMass, My wife and I decided to drive in to Cambridge to see Barry and Betty Moore.  Barry was the godfather of our younger son, Tobias Barrington Wolff, who was then a darling tow headed three year old known as Toby.  When we got to the Moores’ home we found that Herbert was there.  Herbert had gone to teach at UC San Diego when Brandeis refused to renew his contract in 1965, and he had recently lost his second wife, Inge.  The afternoon was, in its way, a trifle bizarre.  Barry and Betty had never had children, and Barry had absolutely no idea how to relate to a five year old and a three year old. All he could think to do with Toby was to talk German to him!  But Marcuse was right in his element.  He picked up one of those old rotating globes that Barry had on his desk, plunked himself down on the floor, and spun it around, showing Toby where all the different countries were.  Toby was enchanted.

At last, the time came for us to leave.  Barry and Herbert walked the four of us to the curb, where we loaded into our big green Chevy station wagon for the drive home.  As little Toby was about to climb into the back seat, he stopped, looked up at Marcuse, raised his hand, and said “Bye, Herbie.”

Marcuse and I crossed paths for the last time fifteen years later, long after he had passed away.  Our family had moved to Boston so that my wife could accept a professorship at MIT and I was casting about for a job in the Boston area.  Fred Sommers, then the Chair of the Philosophy Department, went to the Provost to tell him that he wanted to hire me.  The provost said, “What do you want another Marcuse for?”

It was the greatest professional compliment I have ever received.

A WELCOME ADDITION TO MY QUINE STORIES

Dr. Douglas Quine, son of W. V. O. Quine, sent me a very gracious email about my personal reminiscences of his father. He has agreed to allow me to post the following paragraph, which considerably deepens and enriches one of those memories. I am very grateful to him for this.

I do have one minor addition to your account with regard to my father’s reaction to the horrors of the holocaust. Dad had a strong sense of right and wrong and a visceral reaction to the horrors of the Nazi atrocities. He enrolled as quickly as he could in the WWII effort (even though with his age, his family, and his children he was exempt from the draft) and spent the war in Washington DC decoding the German submarine codes. Throughout the remainder of his life he was passionate about the importance of ending the Holocaust, about the terrible wrongs suffered by the Jewish people, and his admiration for the survivors – many of whom became his colleagues. Many of these feelings are documented in his 1985 autobiography “The Time of My Life”.

WINTER SOLSTICE BLUES

Well, it is New Year’s Eve again, and fog has descended on Chapel Hill, making the whole world look like one of those old sepia toned photographs.  I have never liked this time of year.  The days are short, the sun never  rises very high in the sky, and between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, every day seems like Sunday – no mail, school closed down, everybody on vacation.  When I was young, I would go to the meetings of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, which always met over my birthday [but not, I finally decided, for that reason.]   Since I have reached that stage in life when I retell old stories, perhaps I can cut and paste a story from my autobiography about the very first APA meeting I ever attended, in December 1951.

“My second year, as I recall it, the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association held its annual meetings in New York City. ….  I decided to attend, as I was home for the holidays.  The first day, I was standing with a group of Harvard philosophy graduate students, trying desperately to look older than my just-eighteen years, when Quine walked up to the group.  We all snapped to attention, as his eyes ran around the circle.  Then he looked at me and said, "Well, Wolff.  You must be the youngest person here."  I was utterly mortified.  “Yes," Quine went on, "It's good to see you here.  The sooner you start coming to these things, the sooner you will realize they are not worth coming to," and with that, he walked off, leaving me to wish that the earth would open up and swallow me.”

To this day, I can recall the circle of students and Quine’s look of mordant amusement.  It is difficult to believe that it was 67 years ago.

MORE ABOUT THE LAND OF BLOG

The re-posting of my little Swiftian fantasy triggered a tsunami of comments -- well, three, but since I really do think of this blog as a conversation, that is a lot. So let me respond. First of all, to my friend Warren Goldfarb [who is, as perhaps a few of you may not know, a famous senior logician in the Philosophy Department at Harvard], what on earth is "der shmekel hack"? Google fails me on this one, but it sounds like something I ought to know about.

To James Camion McGuiggan:

What you say strikes a responsive chord in me.  There is something extremely odd about making one's living as a philosopher.  This is a rather recent development, of course, as philosophy goes -- really only in the 18th century did people start to earn their bread as philosophers.  By the way, recall that until Kant was elevated to a professorship at Königsberg, he was a privat docent, which meant that he was paid by the student.  For those of us who considered the transition from a 2-2 to a 3-3 teaching load the end of an era, it is chastening to recall that the greatest  philosopher since Aristotle lectured fourteen hours a week or more on every conceivable subject.

It is even odder that in the United States there are perhaps eight thousand people whose job description is "Professor of Philosophy."  I have not been to a convention of philosophers in a number of decades, but the last time I attended the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, I recall standing in the crowded lobby of the hotel where the meeting was taking place and thinking to myself, "This could be a meeting of the sales force of United Porta-Toilet Corporation, except that they would be better dressed."  What on earth would Socrates think of eight thousand philosophers?  Did Plato charge Aristotle tuition in the Groves of Academe?  I hope not.

By the way, I don't know about where you are, but in the United States, although the manifest function of higher education is to introduce students to the life of the mind, the latent function [to employ Robert Merton's useful distinction] is to sort too many young people into too few high paying jobs.  We are gatekeepers, essentially.

To Magpie:

Your comment reminds me of the hierarchy of characters in the great comic strip Peanuts.  Charlie Brown talks to his dog, Snoopy.  Snoopy talks to his little bird friend, Woodstock, in language that is printed in very small letters.  Woodstock talks to his even littler bird friends, but Woodstock is so small that what he says is represented simply as a series of tiny exclamation marks, which presumably are comprehensible to the tiny birds.  Well, when I was young, Quine talked to people like Charles Parsons and Hao Wang and Burton Dreben and Hartley Rogers [or, later  on Warren Goldfarb], who in turn talked to folks like me, but in characters too small to be read by the likes of Quine, and all of us little birds talked to one another in equally small characters, understandable by ourselves but probably heard only as high-pitched squeaks by Quine.

Still and all, life was fun among us baby birds.  I still recall all of us going out for a collective Chinese meal, whose cost we shared equally, and trying to eat faster than Hubert Dreyfus, who, thin though he was, wielded chopsticks with deadly speed and accuracy.

IDLE THOUGHT

In late September 1950, I began my undergraduate education at Harvard.  Taking the advice of Herb Winston, who had preceded me to Harvard from Forest Hills High School, I enrolled in Philosophy 140, Willard Van Orman Quine’s course on symbolic logic.  We used Quine’s own book, Methods of Logic, in which at one point he introduces a quick and dirty method of ascertaining the validity of certain inferences to which he gives the name “fell swoop.”  The phrase comes from MacBeth and originally meant the cruel, quick killing dive of a hawk or kestrel hunting for rodents and other small prey.  Quine had an unexpectedly puckish sense of humor, and at one point observed that there was an inverse to the fell swoop procedure, which, he suggested, could be called a “swell foop.”  The characteristic and astonishingly fast hunting dive by raptors is called a stoop.  So a fell swoop is a stoop.  I have often wondered whether the 18^th century Irish playwright Oliver Goldsmith had that meaning in mind when he wrote She Stoops to Conquer. 

A RESPONSE TO TALHA

In the midst of a quite complimentary, indeed even fulsome [in the original sense] reference to me, Talha says this:  “Why Prof. Wolff should despise Hegel so much is a fun mystery!”  Talha goes on to note that I draw insights from and praise the work of Karl Mannheim, Herbert Marcuse, and others who were themselves deeply influenced by Hegel.  So what’s up with my hate on Hegel?

I think it is worth replying, not merely to clarify my personal preferences [a rather minor matter, after all], but to spell out my views on how one ought to do philosophy, which may be of interest to a slightly larger audience.

Personal matters first.  I hate Hegel because he makes relatively clear ideas obscure, whereas I have spent the last sixty years trying to make difficult and puzzling ideas as clear and transparent as I am able.  I freely acknowledge that Hegel had some interesting ideas.  I just can’t stand reading his exposition of them.  So sue me.  I don’t like Mahler either.

Now let me try to be a bit more serious.  I was introduced to philosophy at a relatively early age [from sixteen to nineteen] by a group of very gifted philosophers in what was then called the analytic tradition:  Willard Van Orman Quine first, then Nelson Goodman, after that Henry Aiken and Morton White, and then most importantly of all, Clarence Irving Lewis.  By the time I was old enough to get a driver’s license, I had internalized standards of clarity and precision that have stayed with me to this day.  Some were rather trivial: never to confuse use and mention, always to make sure I had the same number of left and right parentheses in a logical formula.  Some were a good deal more important: always to struggle to say what one had in mind as simply and transparently as possible, never to be satisfied with a metaphor that I could not, if called upon, cash in for a literal assertion.

Quine and Goodman and White struck me as supremely intelligent but lacking a certain moral urgency, a deep conviction that what they were doing was important as well as interesting.  It was in Lewis that I, at the age of eighteen, found a satisfying combination of intelligence and moral passion.  To this day, I cherish his comment on the term paper I submitted to his graduate seminar in epistemology.  I had written a paper on Hume, ripping various of his more questionable claims to shreds.  Lewis treated my efforts very gently, and after remarking that "in this paper, it would be out of place to ask that [the points] should 'add up' to something in conclusion," he wrote, "I should hope that this general character of the paper is not a symptom of that type of mind, in philosophy, which can find the objection to everything but advance the solution to nothing."   If I could be described, rather extravagantly, as having had a revelation on the road to Damascus, that was it.

Once I began my own philosophical work, I was guided both by the demand for clarity and precision and by Lewis’ inspiration.  My first major effort was a struggle to come to terms with the Critique of Pure Reason.  I could chop logic with the best of them, but I sought, like Gandalf in the Caves of Moria, to dive deep and struggle with the Balrog to discover the argument lying at the heart of Kant’s great work.  Like Jacob, I wrestled with the book and would not let go until it bless me.  I insisted [and here the voices of Quine and Goodman spoke to me] that what I found within it must be stated by me in clear, precise English, capable of being presented in the shape of a valid formal argument without losing the depth of Kant’s insights.

I brought the same need to Das Kapital, which was, I found, much more difficult to cope with because to succeed I needed to deploy not only the resources of philosophy, economics, mathematics, and history but also the insights of literary criticism.  I brought the same need for both clarity and depth to the writings of Mannheim and Marcuse, in  both of whose works I found insights and arguments of great power.

When I read the writings of Gerald Cohen, Jon Elster, and the other so-called Analytic Marxists, I found that they had achieved clarity and precision at the expense of Marx’s deepest insights, a disappointment I expressed in my essay on Elster [to be found in Box.net].

I can easily imagine that were I to bring to Hegel the same generosity of spirit that has animated me in the reading of these other authors, I would find much to value.

But you must allow an old man his crotchets.

AT T. GENT'S REQUEST

T. Gent invites me to tell stories about C. I. Lewis, a request that surely he [she?] knows I find it impossible to deny.  I shan't say "Stop me if you have heard this one," because in fact those of you who have read my Autobiography have heard most of my stories about Lewis.  Think of this as a family gathering at which Grandfather is encouraged to tell once again the old familiar stories that his children and grandchildren have heard so often.  The enjoyment is not in the stories, which everyone knows by heart, but in the evident pleasure it gives the old man to tell them.

When I arrived at Harvard in 1950, Lewis was in his last years as a professor in the Philosophy Department.  Although there were other senior professors who had either just retired [such as Ralph Barton Perry] or would retire not too long after Lewis [like Raphael Demos], Lewis was very much the grand old man of the Department, at least in our student eyes.  There were at that time a group of young, relatively newly tenured men [you understand that this was long before the Department would even consider hiring a woman, let along tenuring one] --  Willard van Orman Quine, Henry Aiken, Morton White.  I always thought, without any real confirmation, that they felt somewhat stifled by the weight of the departmental heritage and longed to break free from its burden.  We students idolized Lewis, a fact that seemed to rankle with the Young Turks [as I thought of them.]   One story, just to get ahead of myself, will serve to illustrate this.  Lewis retired in 1953, and moved with his wife, Mabel, to California.  The next year he was invited back to give a talk, and contrary to long departmental custom, the faculty as well as the students turned out for the event.  One of the bizarre traditions of the Department was that when a visiting professor came to lecture, no one from the Department would show up.  It was great for the graduate students, who got to ask questions rather than just sitting there like mushrooms, but I often thought it must have puzzled the visitors and perhaps made the more sensitive among them feel snubbed.  At any event, there we all were for Lewis' talk.  When it ended, everyone applauded, and then I stood up to give him a standing ovation.  Other students followed suit, and I saw a look of extremely displeasure on Henry Aiken's face as he was virtually dragged to his feet by some lingering sense of propriety to honor someone he thought he had finally gotten rid of.  I wonder whether that is why Aiken gave me such a hard time on my pre-doctoral oral, but that is another story.

My first encounter with Lewis was in the Fall of 1952, when I took his undergraduate course on Epistemology.  As an eighteen year old senior, I was quite full of myself, and, having taken a course on Hume's Treatise the year before [with Aiken], I wrote a final paper that picked away at some of Hume's claims about impressions and ideas in true Analytic Philosophy fashion.  Lewis treated the paper more gently than it deserved, and made a comment that has stayed with me for the intervening sixty-two years.  After remarking that "in this paper it would be out of place to ask that [the points] should 'add up' to something in conclusion," he wrote: "I should hope that this general character of the paper is not a symptom of that type of mind, in philosophy, which can find the objection to everything but advance the solution to nothing."  I cannot imagine Quine or Aiken or White writing such a comment in those days.

Lewis was a slender man who held himself erect despite his great age [he was, at that point, perhaps ten years younger than I am now.]  He always wore brown three piece suits, and affected pince-nez.  He spoke with somewhat pursed lips [rather like Ronnie Dworkin, it occurs to me now for the first time -- he and Lewis in a way looked alike.]  He was a figure from a bygone era -- this was, after all, during the Korean War, for heaven's sake -- and I am told that not even his colleagues called him anything but Mr. Lewis [though I imagine Raphael Demos called him Clarence.]  It would never have crossed my mind to have a casual chat with him or -- God forbid -- hang out, though there were graduate students who thought nothing of going out for a beer with Henry  Aiken or Van Quine.  Perhaps I should explain, for my younger readers, that in those far-distant days one simply did not cut class or hand a paper in late.  If necessary, you stayed up all night writing it, but at the appointed hour it was handed in.  I can still recall the shocked reaction to a group of undergraduates at Columbia whom I was teaching in 1964 during my first semester there.  I assigned a paper and on the due date a third or more of the students failed to turn it in.  "It will be very hard to pass this course if you do not hand in the paper," I said, and they all sat there staring blankly.  "So those of you who did not submit a paper had better run back to your rooms and spend the next hour churning out something."  They still did not budge -- in  shock, I imagine.  Finally I yelled, "Get up and go!" and they scurried off.  They all did hand in something or other by the end of the hour, even if it was only their notes for the paper they intended sometime or other to write.  Columbia was like that.  One year, in a Department Meeting, we were discussing the lamentable fact that students were presenting themselves for the defense of their doctoral dissertations with a number of Incompletes still on their records.  I proposed that we pass a motion requiring graduate students to complete as course in the academic year in which they took it.  It was summarily voted down as entirely unworkable.

But I digress.  My next story is not really mine to tell, but since Ronnie Dworkin is no longer with us, perhaps I may.  At Harvard [and perhaps elsewhere -- I do not know] Phi Beta Kappa has the practice of admitting a select few students in their Junior Year because of their outstanding records.  [I graduated after only three years, but I would not have been one of the Junior Eight anyway -- you needed virtually all A's for that.  I did make Phi Bete at graduation.  My big sister, Barbara, who graduated summa from Swarthmore, had of course made Phi Bete also, and when I came home with my new gold key, my mother appropriated both mine and Barbara's and had a pair of earrings made from them for herself.  But I would not want you to think she was at all competitive with her sisters-in-law.]  As you might expect, Ronnie Dworkin was Junior Phi Bete.  Well, the Society had a custom of inviting some distinguished member of the faculty to address their annual meeting.  Lewis was tapped by the selection committee, and since Ronnie was a Philosophy major, he was deputized to go see the old man and invite him.  As Ronnie told the story afterward, when I asked Lewis to be the Phi Beta Kappa speaker that year, Lewis smiled sadly and declined, saying that as he had not been elected to the society, he thought it would be inappropriate.  Ronnie sais that he wanted to cry, "It's all right, Clarence.  You have made up for it!" but he simply nodded and reported back.

Since I have so often made reference to Lewis' famous Kant course, perhaps I should take a few moments to explain how he ran it.  The sole assigned reading was the Critique, in the Kemp Smith translation.  Each week, we were assigned between thirty and sixty pages of the text, seriatim, and were required to write a summary of the passage.  The summary was to be four to seven pages long, and was to reproduce every heading and sub-heading in the text.  Along the left hand margin we were to keep a running tabulation of the pages of the text we were summarizing.  [Kant published two extremely important versions of the Critique -- the First Edition in 1781 and the Second Edition in 1787.  Because the changes in the Second Edition are substantial and philosophically of the first importance, all modern editions and translations include both variants.  To keep track, the original first and second edition pagination is printed in the text, usually in the margin, and we were to follow that practice.] 

These were summaries, you understand, not interpretations or our critical opinions or allusions to other philosophers -- just summaries.  The assigned length was deliberately -- we thought maliciously -- designed to force to make a series of difficult choices about what to include and what to omit.  Fewer pages and we could simply have skated along the surface of the text;  more pages would have allowed us to include everything.  We were also compelled to master the eighteenth century philosophical terminology Kant used, along with his innovations.  One summary was due each week, and there was no question about turning one in late.  if you fell behind, you might as well drop the course!  The summaries were graded by a graduate student and handed back fast enough so that you could learn from your mistakes before the next one was due.  My year, Hugo Bedau, later my very good friend and now sadly departed, was the grader.  When I gave the course seven years later, I graded all the summaries myself, not trusting some graduate student who had never studied the Critique with me.  That first year twenty-six students took my Kant course and wrote eleven summaries each.  Two hundred and seventy-one summaries, plus the final exams.

Writing the Kant summaries was the hardest work I ever did in any course.  Each one took maybe twenty hours a week -- Basic Training of the mind.  It was far and away the greatest educational experience of my life, and as it turned out, led directly to my first, and maybe my best, book.  Several years after Lewis retired, some of us got together to pool our notes in an effort to immortalize his lectures, but to our surprise we found that there was not much in the notes.  What then had made this the best course any of us had ever taken?  For that it was the best course, indeed probably the best Philosophy course taught anywhere by anyone since Plato lectured to Aristotle we had no doubt.

Each of us who was fortunate enough to take the course must have his own my answer.  My answer, surprisingly, is moral rather than epistemological.  Lewis was, for me, the indelible image of the Philosopher committed, as a moral imperative, to a search for clarity and understanding.  Although I think he would have been rather embarrassed to hear it said, Lew is radiated the conviction that in the study of Kant anything less than our complete commitment was a sin against truth.  In the Harvard Department in those days, or so I saw it, there were morally admirable professors, like John Wild, who however could not think their way out of a paper bag, and bright men for whom Philosophy was little more than a fascinating game.  Only Lewis combined rigor and clarity [and a grasp of Logic, which was essential in those days] with a moral commitment to the enterprise of Philosophy.

Seven years after taking Philosophy 130, I found myself teaching in the same room, from the same raised podium, behind the same desk where Lewis had sat so many times over the years.  I wrote to Lewis, who was then in retirement in California, to tell him that I was teaching his old course from the same podium, using his system of Kant summaries.  He wrote back to say that it was not his method but that of his professor.  Whom could that have been, all those years earlier?  Josiah Royce?  George Santayana?  I realize that I had somehow stumbled my way into a tradition of giants.  It was a daunting thought.

The first year that I taught the Kant course almost all of my students were undergraduates, but when I repeated the course the next year, twelve graduate students enrolled, some of them no younger than I was.  Among them were Margaret Dauler, later Margaret Wilson, and of course Thomas Nagel.  Saul Kripke, then an undergraduate, showed up for two or three weeks but apparently decided there was nothing there to interest him and stopped coming.

Well, ask me for a story and get a saga.  T. Gent, I hope this suffices for the moment.