Justice O'Connor has passed away. May she rest in peace. My first thought upon hearing of this sad event was about the CASEY decision in 1992, and about how this looks in retrospect. Casey came just as a twelve-year period of continuous Republican occupation of the White House was ending. Clinton won the election that year -- before then, Reagan and the elder Bush had been President, and it was widely believed that they had put enough Federalist Society types on the High Court to ensure that ROE v. WADE was going to be overturned. Yet Casey surprised people. Not only was ROE not overturned, what the court called its "essential holding" was specifically retained. This was due to the emergence of a "centrist bloc" consisting of Antony Kennedy, David Souter, and ... Sandra Day O'Connor. Although their decisive opinion in CASEY was put out as a joint opinion -- no one author among the three -- O'Connor was the one of the three with the greatest seniorit...
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As a fitting remembrance of the late Matthew Perry, the fellow who brought Chandler Bing to life, allow me to reflect in academic form on a contradiction at the heart of the FRIENDS' theme song. The first line of the first verse: No one ever told you life was gonna be this way seems in pretty direct conflict with the fifth line of the third verse: Your mother told you there'd be days like these. The predicate of the two sentences is identical: "to tell." The subject affirmed by the latter would seem pretty clearly to be included in the subject denied in the former. That is: Mom is somebody. And, considering the object case, life is a succession of days. Perhaps some philosopher could defend the song from the charge that there is a DIRECT contradiction in the lyrics by contending that the object case in the former sentence seems to refer to a more pervasive condition of "life" than simply that it contains "days like these." But is it possible...
Gloria Vanderbilt passed away on June 17, of stomach cancer. She was of course one of THE Vanderbilts, a direct descendant of Cornelius (aka The Commodore) Vanderbilt, a man who built a business empire out of the new steam technologies -- he was one of the first to make effective use of the Fulton steamships, and later the first of the great Railroad barons. What was Gloria's connection? She was the Commodore's great-great-granddaughter: the daughter of Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt who was the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who (though his name might be misleading in this connection) was the son of William Henry Vanderbilt, who in turn was the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt the one and only. Moving forward in time rather than back, Gloria was the mother of Anderson Cooper (by her fourth husband, Wyatt Emory Cooper). And Anderson is now a prominent news anchor with CNN. Aside from the genealogy in either direction, Gloria will be remembered as a woman who created a new...
You, dear reader, may have noticed that obits of an idiosyncratic sort are an infrequent but regular feature of this blog. In the fourth quarter of 2018 thus far there have been three: Adolf Grunbaum, Whitey Bulger, Mary Midgley. Three obits in a little less than three months. That frequency is characteristic. Two philosophers and a gangster. That's a decent sampling, too. During that same period, lots of other important people have passed away about whom I've had nothing to say, including most prominently George H.W. Bush, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Allen and William Coors! A politician, a director, and two captains of industry. Is there a principle of selection? None known to me. I'm not averse to writing about the holders of public office, or artists of any medium, or business titans. I've written about all of those and I believe (without checking this moment) I've done obits here of tokens of each of those types. If any of my readers has noticed a patte...
Mary Midgley passed away this month. I'm told she was a renowned ethicist, active in discussions of animal rights, I don't know any of her work in that field. I am familiar with her chiefly as a nemesis of Richard Dawkins. She forcefully criticized his use of the word "selfish" as an adjective that could coherently modify "gene." This is, as it happens, the headline of the Telegraph's obituary of her: "Mary Midgley, moral philosopher who took on Richard Dawkins." Genes, she wrote, "cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological." [I agree on the atoms, though I'm not sure about the elephants. Was she saying elephants cannot think abstractly? or just that any given elephant we might meet is an individual creature, not the abstraction ELEPHANT?] That first review was part of a long feud, and Midgley eventually apologized (to readers, not to Dawkins) for wha...
A Marxist philosopher, Roy Bhaskar, passed away on November 19, 2014. May he rest in peace., He is of interest to me only because he was such a magnificently terrible writer. Marxism doesn't necessarily produce an awful, impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose style. Hell, Christopher Hitchens, Sidney Hook, Terry Eagleton were all Marxists of one sort or another (were or are -- I believe Eagleton is still amongst us). Yet each could write quite well. But Bhaskar? Here is a sample of his work (chosen with malice of course, but all the better for that): "Indeed, dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal -- of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/ Aristotelian provenance, of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and-or psycho-somaticall...
The well-known journalist, true-crime author, and provocateur Joe McGinniss died Monday, March 9th at the age of 71. Here's an obit with the basics, from the grey lady. McGinniss first found a spot in the public spotlight with The Selling of the President , his account of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. As the title suggested, the book played against the series of Theodore White campaign chronicles. As my contribution to the marking of McGinniss' death I'll share one detail from the book that I personally find amusing. McGinniss is telling the story of Nixon's men trying to round up a six-person panel of 'ordinary people' to ask Nixon questions on a television show, a political infomercial if you will. McGinniss himself made a suggestion, "I suggested a psychiatrist I knew: the head of a group that brought Vietnamese children wounded in the war to the United States for treatment and artificial limbs." Roger Ailes (the executive producer o...
Burton Lifland, a very important figure in bankruptcy law, indeed the closest thing the world of bankruptcy jurisprudence has ever had to a 'rock star,' died unexpectedly on Sunday, January 12, 2014. I've written an obituary for him already, at the AllAboutAlpha site. Here I'll simply bring together some of what is being said about his passing around the blogosphere. Some have been satisfied with a minimal acknowledgement of his passing. But the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog goes further, listing some of the most high-profile cases over which he presided, including the bankruptcies of Johns Manville and R.H. Macy. Dealbook , The New York Times' sponsored blog on financial issues, stresses Lifland's involvement in the ongoing liquidation of the legal entities once associated with federal prisoner Bernard Madoff . Here's some more on that aspect of Lifland's career from another source. Unsurprisingly, many of Lifland's ru...
Barbara Branden, perhaps best known as the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), and as co-author, with then-husband Nathaniel Branden, of Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), died on December 11th. The actress Julie Delpy played Barbara in a TV movie based on The Passion of Ayn Rand, and sharing that name, which aired in 1999. No less of a legend than Helen Mirren played the titular protagonist. Given the above two paragraphs, you may well see the headline above as odd. But as Branden tells us in The Passion , and as many of the obits have mentioned, BB did study philosophy with the Marxist/pragmatist/and eventual neocon Sidney Hook, at New York University. She defended Hook in conversations within the Randian circle as someone who was committed to reason. I'd rather write about Hook than about Rand any day. In the era in which BB knew him, Hook was known as the author of Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933)and From Hegel to Marx (1936). Th...