R.I.P. Robert M. Adams (the philosopher, not the English prof)

He was my favorite living philosopher of religion. He also wrote about ethics, metaphysics, and the early modern philosophers. The one talk I heard him give at Cornell took issue with Rawls on political disagreement; rereading the article it became, I’m sure it was this work that inspired me to hew certain paths in my dissertation.

I’ve taught two of his essays –

“Saints”;

“Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief ”

– as well as one of his briefs for the divine command theory of morality (which of them, I’d have to check; on this topic, see the first part of “Moral Arguments,” above).

He looked and sounded like a grump, but his former students were devoted to him. Some trekked in from out of state for that talk at Cornell.

See too these remembrances on Leiter’s blog, especially Leiter’s, Zimmerman’s, Brennan’s, and Buras’s.

Notice that Zimmerman regards as a kindness Adams’s evisceration of his ideas on free will. It’s stunning that in 1991 Zimmerman interviewed to work at UCLA having written little more than a four-page proposal for his dissertation. A different era!

Buras reports an experience rather like mine, of not-fully-conscious absorption of Adamsian thinking. I’ve actually never read “Flavors, Colors, and God.” Maybe I should do so tonight, along with David Lewis’s reply. Ah, for the days when so many important papers were short.

A weed is a plant out of place

Karin got one of her largest paychecks of the year and went “hog wild” – literally – buying such a huge hunk of “clearance” pork that I had to lug it through the house for her.

Said she: “I’ll ask Scott” – her new stepfather – “to smoke it for us.”

Nothing doing. Karin’s mom & Scott moved into a new house this weekend. They no longer have access to their smoker.

I’m all for putting the pork into various slow cookers and then shredding it and eating it with homemade “Alabama” sauce.

(See, I am become a middle-aged man who talks about his meats.)

By the end of the week, we should have the picnic table that I ordered through Facebook Marketplace. I’ve been fond of picnic tables since I was in high school. I and my dorm-mates used to enjoy suppers out of doors.

Karin & I tend to pursue our respective “home improvement” ideas independently of one another. Her ambition for the back yard, tonight, was to pull out weeds that no one sees. This was complicated by her confusion as to what is and what isn’t a weed. I told her about a passage in Jim Thompson that I read not long ago, in which Lou Ford’s defense lawyer tells him a definition that comes “right out of the agronomy books”:

“A weed is a plant out of place.” I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower. … You’re in my garden, Mr. Ford.

I’ve been revisiting the nineties’ contextualist epistemologists, whom I briefly studied many years ago, in order to read the aughts’ “pragmatic encroachment” epistemologists (whose work I was downright oblivious to at the time). Keith DeRose, in a recent collection of old and new essays, is apologetic because his “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is such a long paper. David Lewis ends his famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge,” by saying that although he could have written it longer, and nearer to the truth, that wouldn’t have been in anyone’s interest. His paper displays a certain amount of formalism thrown about informally, together with casual references to guys named Fred and Donald in the vicinity of San Francisco, in service of a view with Chestertonian paradoxicality. An insider’s paper: important, but surely a pain to teach. A paper with weed-like qualities in just about any home garden.

Moving, pt. 3

This organizing of my library is rather fraught. I’ve run out of shelves; worse, I must constantly say goodbye, for the time being, to this or that cherished volume. One of the books going into storage is called Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy. They will continue to be neglected – which seems doubly cruel since, perhaps, they were on the verge of being attended to. … Also, the mere deciding is strenuous. Were I to pack away one book by Joyce Carey, I might as well pack them all. But what of, say, P.D. James? Should I keep available her omnibuses? If so, what of her mass-market paperbacks? And is my need for P.D. James lesser or greater than my need for, say, Colette or Ronald Firbank? Is this the year in which I begin to read through Dostoevsky? In philosophy, at least, things are more cut-and-dried. City of God and On the Plurality of Worlds must stay out no matter whether I manage to peek in them during the next couple of years.

On the familial front, little Samuel was just given a set of immunizations. He cried bitterly at this betrayal.

The joy of getting, pt. 2

Karin & I went to four Christmas gatherings. All were relatively painless, and some were quite nice.

As mentioned a few entries ago, I participated in the gift exchange held by Karin’s mother’s family. I’d been assigned to buy gifts for Brianna. She’d asked for clothes and toys with decorations of Hufflepuff – her Harry Potter “house” – and of Bob’s Burgers, the TV show. My selections were very well-received: especially, the Bob’s Burgers-themed Clue game, which we all played after we finished eating the Christmas meal. (Brianna was the murderer, of course.)

Brianna also had drawn my name for the exchange. She used her $50 budget to order three books for me, all of them new, though I’d submitted a much longer wish list of used books. Two of the new books arrived in time for Christmas; one is still in the mail.

The three books are:

• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (not yet arrived);
• The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro; and
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Due to my puny haul, and out of pity, Karin bought me the last two of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals (used).

At the gathering of Karin’s dad’s family, I was given a book called A Journal for Jordan, the heartrending true story of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq and the woman and child he left behind. This, apparently, is a “joke” gift that has been passed around between all the family members.

I also was given a t-shirt depicting Schrödinger’s cat:

The cat is a recurring topic of discussion in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which Karin’s dad’s family enjoys. I don’t watch that sitcom – it’s about nerds – but I do like cats and metaphysics (which is not the same discipline as physics). I talked to Karin’s dad’s family about this horrifying philosophical paper to show that I appreciated their gift.