Steven Louis Reynolds passed away last month, (March 21) in Salt Lake City, of complications related to Parkinson’s disease. His fine 2017 book, Knowledge as Acceptable Testimony took a social view of what we mean by knowledge. Sorry, Descartes, but someone sitting at a desk alone determined to figure out whether he knows anything has already lost the battle. Knowledge only has meaning and 'knowledge' only has meaning within a world populated by other people in which such affiliated ideas as 'acceptable testimony' make sense. Reynolds received his PhD from UCLA and he spent more than three decades teaching philosophy at Arizona State University. I did a search of his name looking for photos. I persistently got one of him standing in a cave, which accordingly I have used. Was he a spelunker on his spare time or was he making a sly point about Platonism? Either way: rest in peace, professor.
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Robert “Bob” Hilary Kane died on April 20, 2024, at the age of 85, after a brief illness. He spent his final moments surrounded by family and friends at his home in Guilford, CT. Kane had moved to Guilford in 2022, and I've read that until very recently he remained a regular at his grandchildren’s sporting events and noted for his daily walk on the town green. In lieu of flowers, his family suggests people contribute what they can to his preferred charities: The Union of Concerned Scientists , The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund , The National Alliance on Mental Illness , or Fair Vote . (Intriguing list of causes there.) But he isn't here because of any of that. He gets an obit on Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed because he was, for decades until his passing, the most distinguished contemporary advocate of the incompatibilist/ indeterminist view of the philosophical issue of free will, the view associated with William James, Isaiah Berlin, Ka...
A philosopher and theologian of some importance passed away on April 17. I refer to Robert M. Adams, long affiliated with the UNC Chapel Hill and with Rutgers. Adams gave the Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1998-99. This alone makes him worthy of note. The Gifford lectures have become legendary as a regular contribution by one or another significant scholar, each presented originally as a lecture series over the course of an academic year though put eventually into book form. The mandate from the will of the late Lord Gifford is that the lectures should "promote the knowledge of God" in "the widest sense." This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who have been honored with a Gifford invitation have included Josiah Royce, William James, Henri Bergson, Etienne Gilson, Samuel Alexander, Arthur Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Eccles, Simon Bla...
Kenneth Kipnis, a philosopher affiliated with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has died. He left a wide range of writing, on medical ethics, the philosophy behind constitutional law, prisoners' rights, and much else. He co-authored at least two books with Diana T. Meyers: KINDRED MATTERS (1993, about the philosophy of the family -- inspiring my photo choice here) and POLITICAL REALISM (2020, about international politics and ethics in the nuclear age). Kipnis was an active participant in AMINTAPHIL, the AMerican section of the INTernational Association for PHILosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Rest in peace.
John Randolph (JR) Lucas, pictured here, received his philosophical education at Oxford University in the 1950s. He was a student of R.M Hare, a central figure in mid 20th century debates over meta-ethics. Lucas never took to meta-ethics himself, though. His interests were in applied (business) ethics, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of mind. Probably the one contribution of Lucas' that will still draw the attention of the historians of philosophy in another century is his invocation of Godel's incompleteness theorem in the course of arguments about the human mind and artificial intelligence, which in turn inspired Douglas Hofstadter. Much of Godel, Escher, Bach was a reply to Lucas. Here's a Lucas paper on point: http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth08.html If I understand the argument, Lucas believed that humans will in principle always be able to outsmart computers (or "Turing machines") because such machines have limits that follo...
A distinguished philosopher, and historian of philosophy, Brian McGuinness, passed away on December 23, 2019. Here is a list of some his publications. As you may notice, he was an authority on Wittgenstein and on related matters such as the Vienna Circle. Oddly, I haven't found a decent obituary. Please let me know if you see one, dear reader. Thanks. https://philpapers.org/s/Brian%20McGuinness
A well-known popularizer of philosophy has passed away. Bryan Magee died on July 16 in a hospital after a long illness. Magee was the author of MEN OF IDEAS (1982), PHILOSOPHY AND THE REAL WORLD (1985), CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER (1997), and WAGNER AND PHILOSOPHY (2001), etc. He was a great popularizer of philosophy for non-academic audiences, adept at breaking down complex problems into their component parts and presenting them in ordinary (and non-patronizing!) prose. It was Magee's view that Immanuel Kant brought about "the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy," and that Kant was right to compare it to the turning produced by Copernicus in astronomy. Magee wrote, "Because of the fundamental character of these problems [unearthed by Kant], and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since." However well expressed it may be, I don't believe that. ...
Lyra McKee, a reporter of some reputation in Northern Ireland, died in the line of duty on April 18, during rioting in Derry, a/k/a Londonderry. Police in that city recently cracked down on the apparent stockpiling of weapons and gasoline bombs by Republican groups. Pursuing this crackdown, they engaged in sweeping searches of homes. The searches catalyzed riots, and McKee died covering that responsive violence. She was killed by bullets apparently intended for police. The leaders of all of Northern Ireland's major political parties, from the Democratic Unionists to Sinn Fein, issued a joint statement calling this shooting a threat to the progress made over the last 20 years; progress, they said, toward peace and democracy. McKee had a book ready for publication, to be called THE LOST BOYS, focusing on the disappearance of two young men in Belfast during 'The Troubles.' Her death comes as debate in London over Brexit becomes ever more intertwined with the matter o...
Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton, and a man who had held important economic policy posts in each of the last two Democratic administrations, died on March 16, of suicide. As I write, I do not know the means of suicide. I'm not sure if I should even be wondering why, or if the silence should be taken as a good thing, a giftless horse into whose mouth I should not look. He was 58 years old. His political views were standard-issue center-left. One of the facts that draw my attention, looking at some of the bio notice issued since his death, is: why was his time in the Obama administration so brief? Krueger was named chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors in November 2011, three years after Obama's election. He left that office in August 2013. So he was there for less than two years out of an 8 year term. Then the President brought in Jason Furman instead. Was there a power-struggle story there that we in the general public have never been told...
Nathan Glazer died on the 19th of last month. He is best known as the author of BEYOND THE MELTING POT (1963) and of WE ARE ALL MULTICULTURALISTS NOW (1997) These are both books that, as the titles indicate, discussed in a scholarly way the vexed issue of ethnic and cultural identities in the United States within the context of two very different political eras. There was much else to Glazer's life and career, but I will focus here on those two books, BTMP and WAAMN. BTMP as a book formally co-authored with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then executive assistant to the Secretary of Labor. But it is generally recognized as consisting mostly of Glazer's work. It made the then-unusual argument that ethnicities don't melt. Focusing especially on New York City, the authors contended that the children and even grandchildren of waves of immigration to NYC, from Puerto Rico, Italy, Ireland, or by Jews from much of the continent of Europe [Glazer's parents were Jews from Polan...
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 thought about Senator McCain. No full accounting of his place in our public life in recent decades (yes, it has been decades) could fail to mention his relationship with fraudster Charles H. Keating. In the late 1980s, as the savings & loan system was unraveling, McCain was one of a group of five legislators who intervened to try to halt a regulatory investigation of the Lincoln S&L that Keating controlled. Each of the five had taken substantial political contributions fro m Keating. This made things look and smell like a quid pro quo. It was at the very best a case of extremely bad judgment and ugly 'optics' on McCain's part. That said: perfect human beings are rare, and when one of the more common imperfect beings has just left us it is the custom to focus attention on what was right in his life, not what was wrong. I accept that custom. McCain leaves a rather clean smell behind him all in all. For example and to his credit: McCain testified ...
One of science fiction's greats passed away late last month. I refer of course to Harlan Ellison, the author of Web of the City (1958), Spider Kiss (1961), and A Boy and His Dog (1969). But Ellison worked best in forms that were not book length. Among his many published collections of short stories, Stalking the Nightmare (1982), Angry Candy (1988) and Mind Fields (1994). No, that isn't a photo of Ellison I've attached here. I'll tell you who the b-and-w photo is of in due course. Ellison was probably best known, though, for having written the screenplay for the greatest episode of the original Star Trek, "City on the Edge of Forever." Or, rather, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay. My understanding is that Roddenberry re-wrote it quite radically, in ways to which Ellison was never reconciled. Well, that's show biz. The basic plot involves a time machine that sends Captain Kirk back to the year 1930, a soup kitchen in Depression-stri...
Baruch Brody has passed away. He was a distinguished philosopher, affiliated with Rice University since 1975. Made great contributions to bioethics. He argued passionately and analytically that there is a fundamental distinction between active and passive euthanasia, between Dr Kevorkian on the one hand and a DNR order on the other. On such matters, see his book, TAKING ISSUE (2004). That distinction is now not especially controversial, among laypeople anyways, (among moral philosophers everything is controversial, 'cause that's their racket). Particulars here: http://news.rice.edu/2018/06/01/rice-mourns-professor-emeritus-baruch-brody-former-chair-of-philosophy-dept/
Insofar as any one man has served as the public face of "conversion therapy" over the years, it has been that of the dearly departed Joseph Nicolosi. Nicolosi, the author of REPARATIVE THERAPY FOR MALE HOMOSEXUALITY (1997) passed away last week, on March 8, at the age of 70. I've written about conversion therapy, as a legal issue, before in this blog. Here's a link: once you get to the other side of it, scroll down a bit The above is the stock photo of Nicolosi used by MSNBC. It makes him look like a televangelist, which seems fair. Apparently the phrase "reparative therapy" was Nicolosi's own coinage, and refers to his views as distinct from some other styles of conversion effort. He coined it because he held the view that (male) homosexuality is a unconscious effort to repair a sense of inferiority. I really ought to read or at least skim Nicolosi's book before commenting further. But, hey, this is a blog, and ignorance isn't usua...
I have little to add to all the commentary that is flooding the internet on this event. But I will add something, because to fail to do so might be thought idiosyncratic. Also, because I was born in 1958, the year that ended with Castro's victory. So I have some sort of fortuitous connection with the man, and it would be bad karma to ignore his death. I think of the movie Godfather 2. And by this route, thinking about Castro will bring us around to William James and pragmatism. The best scenes in that movie were the Cuba scenes, centering on the Corleone family's efforts to get in on the action in Cuba in 1958. The family was late in its timing, and had to make a hurried exit during the New Year's' Eve festivities that the revolution had so rudely interrupted. Before the plot gets to that final collapse of the gangsters' friendly regime, though, it shows us that Michael (Al Pacino) has a premonition that Castro will win. He has seen that the rebels are w...
The world recently lost my younger brother (younger by a mere 13 months), Mark Henry Faille. The manner of his death was shocking to some of us, but is not something into which I wish to go here. This blog is not for gossip, or even for intensely personal reactions to family events. It consists chiefly of my reflections on the universe at large. I was honored by the decision of Mark's widow that I deliver the eulogy at the service. I discussed there, and so in effect I discussed with family and friends, some philosophical considerations tangential to Mark's death. Adapting a bit the words of the Desiderata , I'll say only here that I spoke my truth quietly and clearly, conscious that others may well think my words dull and ignorant, but hoping that they will see a story worthy of their attention there nonetheless. Mark was extraordinary in his combination of skills, his lack of ambition in connection with any of these skills, and his utter lack of ...
Wojciech Jaruzelski, a man whose passing I cannot regret, RIP. Jaruzelski passed away on May 25th of this year, after suffering a stroke earlier in the month. His place in the history books is ignoble but secure. He was a General by trade, and he became the only military official ever to head a ruling European Communist Party when he became First Secretary in Poland, in October 1981. Two months later he became the General who declared martial law in Poland, acting at the cat's paw of the old Soviet Union. such actions are a sign of a regime's weakness not strength -- the Solidarnosc movement was becoming too much for him. Nowadays, the world still witnesses Russia's efforts to extend its control over its neighbors, largely through complacent local paws. But since the demise of the USSR and the discrediting of the once-marketable ideology of "actually existing communism" has left Moscow's imperial stretch weakened. The flash points now are to the...