Thoughts from
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Philosophy memories
By Tom Smith

Brian Leiter has an interesting history of the ups and downs of various philosophy departments over the years. It brings back some memories for me. I was a philosophy major at Cornell when it was a powerhouse department. Terry Irwin taught the Greeks, Kant and Rawls and was a dedicated teacher of undergraduates as well as graduates. To say he was held in high esteem by undergraduates and graduates alike would be a gross understatement. Norman Kretzman gave me the first "C" on a paper I had gotten since about 6th grade, woke me from my doctrinal slumbers and got me fascinated with medieval philosophy as I have been since. Nick Sturgeon was super smart and another dedicated teacher. Stalnaker was a bit of a cold fish but also scary smart. Dick Boyd taught philosophy of science and was good. Visitors included Saul Kripke, Rawls, Max Black, and on and on. It was pretty thrilling to a kid from Boise, Idaho.

After Cornell I went to Oxford and tried to decide if I wanted to study more philosophy and ending up compromising. I was in the B.Phil program for a term, but found myself assigned to P.M.S. Hacker, whose first initials aptly describe him. R.M Hare and Jeremy Waldron proved you don't have to be a jerk to be a top philosopher, but I had ended up with Hacker. So I quit the B.Phil. and read PPE and ended up with Waldron as my top tutor (I forget the official Oxford slang). He was great; another great teacher.

After that I went to law school at Yale, mostly because I did not know what else to do and vaguely thought it might lead to an exciting career in Washington. Intellectually speaking, I found Yale a crushing let down from Cornell and Oxford. I was used to small seminars with great minds. At one seminar at Oxford, led by Dworkin, Derek Parfit and AK Sen, I found myself sitting next to HLA Hart and Charles Taylor. Parfit, widely regarded as a genius but pretty full of himself, was going on with some theory about moral consensus. I asked a question intended to puncture his theory and with Dworkin's help, it did. Parfit was really pissed off, and Dworkin came up afterwards to introduce himself to me! From that, I went to being condescend to by Bruce Ackerman at Yale, who wanted nothing to do with any student not licking his shoes and who, whatever Brian says, I just don't consider to be a serious philosopher, not in Dworkin's or Parfit's league anyway. It was pretty depressing.

After law school I decided to apply to philosophy graduate school and got into Harvard and Princeton, which were, as no less an authority than Brian confirms, the best departments at the time. I was ready to either give up law or do real philosophy and law. I visited Harvard, thinking, I could be studying with Rawls and Nozick! They were both there at the time. But the graduate students told such depressing stories. No need to bother with Nozick, they said. You're not a hot babe; he only likes hot babe students. As to Rawls, he doesn't like grad students at all. And watch out for [forget the name], the director of graduate studies, he's a sadist, no, not figuratively speaking, they said, a real DSM-IV, diagnosable sadist. Yikes. So I called Princeton on the phone. It actually seemed like a much better program, but their idea of what a good job was was so depressing, I gave it up and took a job in law teaching instead.

A few weeks ago, I was looking at some book about Wittgenstein and my wife said, "Oh, Wittgenstein. I have a patient who likes him." "Is he a philosopher?" I asked. "He has a PhD from Pittsburgh," she said "but he works as a groundskeeper at a golf course. He likes it. It leaves him lots of time to read philosophy."
posted by thomas at 10/31/2003 12:16:00 PM