More dead philosophers

Two lovely parties this weekend: one, yesterday, for the seventieth wedding anniversary of Dorothy & Gene, from church; and another, today, for the first birthday of my niece, Penelope.

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Two more philosophers have died: Daniel Dennett and Charles Parsons.

There have been several remarks along these lines: Dennett was one of the greatest recent philosophers. I don’t agree, but he was a wonderfully lively writer. He was … opinionated. This is from the first page I looked at, in the preface of the new (2015) edition of Elbow Room:

The varieties of free will worth wanting, the varieties that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility, are not only not threatened by advances in (neuro-)science; they are distinguished, explained, and justified in detail [in the book]. There are other readily definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with what we now know about how human beings control their behavior, such as “libertarian freedom” or “agent causation.” They don’t, and can’t, exist, but although some philosophers still take them seriously, they are of only historical interest, like mermaids and leprechauns.

Now that’s confidence. (Is there much historical interest in leprechauns?)

I don’t know if Parsons was unconfident, but he was no Dennett; lecturing, he’d pause mid-sentence for minutes … then carry on. (Brilliantly, it’s said.)

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Robert Adams advised the dissertation of one of my dissertation examiners (Derk). My recent browsing of Adams’s work inspired me to find out more about my other examiners’ advisers. Nick’s was the formidable Gilbert Harman; I don’t plan to write about him tonight. Dick’s adviser was Rogers Albritton. Now here was a unicorn – a philosopher so great, he barely published; whose few publications read like spillage from a sloshing cauldron of rich, still-brewing philosophy soup ( fanesca, perhaps); whose notebooks have been mined for posthumous publication. (Cf. two interesting obituaries, here and here.)

By the way, there will be a memorial conference for Dick this Saturday. I wish I could attend: to honor and learn more about Dick, and to see my Salvationist friend, Yvonne, Frank’s widow, whose health is failing.

A “budget” option

Monday is a bank holiday, the holiday of Washington and FDR and Trump and the fellow buried in Grant’s tomb, who might be my favorite of them all because he was the best writer. (The criterion isn’t so ludicrous. Whenever I see informal polls about the greatest [U.S.] Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers get lots of votes, and I often catch myself thinking of writers first – especially, Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain – not so much because of what they did or stood for, though that also matters, but because of how they wrote.) Anyway, today, Karin worked her last shift in a good while. She expects to be on maternity leave through March – which isn’t a paid leave, she keeps having to tell people who assume otherwise. It’ll be good to have her at home. It’ll be good, though not so pleasant, to live more frugally.

Speaking of frugality.

I’d known about the Cambridge Elements book series, but I hadn’t known that so, so many of those books are free to download (some only temporarily).

Most are shorter than 100 pages. They all try to painlessly introduce the reader to important recent scholarship.

This webpage states the series’s goals and subject categories, and this one lists the titles in reverse publication order. You can see which books are currently free by ticking a box on the left.

I can vouch for this author, a professor of whom I was fond. Is he the world’s leading free-will philosopher? Maybe. Does he believe in free will? No; he comes as close to believing as one can do while disbelieving, which is cheeky. Does he believe in moral responsibility? Not if it should require free will; but he is open to revising the concept so that a person can be held responsible even if she isn’t free. Is he a religious believer? Yes. He is a Calvinist. But his main arguments don’t presuppose much, or anything, by way of doctrine. But whatever you think of his position, the point of reading this book is to get an overview of the recent secular literature, and so it is valuable.

Is he a great writer and therefore a great (U.S.) American? I should say not; he was born in the Netherlands, and as for his identification with this side of the pond, I believe that when he wrote his most famous book he was merely a Canadian.

His Cambridge Elements book is free to download through February 23.

Our trip to the east, pt. 3

What I’d forgotten about Ithaca is that you’re always climbing. The hills are steep; worse, the buildings tend to have lots of stairs. Ithacans are used to this. Karin & I are not.

Yesterday, at Karin’s prompting, we climbed up one of the gorges – just after having breakfasted more than was good for us. Of course, we left the car at the bottom of the gorge, so that when we reached the top we had no choice but to climb right back down again.

We were pretty well ruined after that. No matter: we dragged ourselves around to my other old haunts.

Karin told me the baby kicked and kicked, as if to say, What ARE you doing.

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Today, I defended my dissertation. It received a result of “pass.”

Everyone was very kind. I was put at ease when Derk, the first committee member to arrive, told me what a lovely dissertation I’d written.

The hero of the occasion was my old teacher, Nick, who agreed to serve on my committee despite having retired seven years earlier. He’s physically infirm. And yet he played a crucial role during the defense, asking sharp questions and providing encouragement.

It was poignant to learn of the intention of my adviser, Dick, to retire at the end of this month. As I’ve been completing my degree, he’s been wrapping up his career.

Karin also was present at the defense – as was my son.