It was my good fortune to be a participant in Roderick Chisholm's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Brown University in 1981. My summer digs were in Boston in those days and I would drive the old VW bus down Interstate 95 three times a week to Providence.
Here you will find a brief biography of the man, a bit about his philosophy, and the reminiscences of Ernest Sosa, Dean Zimmerman, and James van Cleve.
I will add an anecdote of my own. The NEH seminar met three days per week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Chisholm wore the same outfit each day, the same blue shirt, the same gray pants, week after week. Am I sure it was numerically the same blue shirt? Pretty sure. I conjectured that he handed it to his wife on Friday and she had it ready for him again on Tuesday.
He addressed us formally using our surnames: Mr. Burke, Miss Baber, Mr. Oaklander. I appreciated the old school Ivy League civility and reserve. Understatement at that level is a mark of class. Everyone had a doctorate, but it was taken for granted. Understatement de rigueur; use of titles, middle-class. Ostentation low-class. But that was then.
If only I knew then what I know now, and had the confidence then that I have now! I would then have profited more from the master who put me in mind of Franz Brentano and the latter's seriousness and Wissenschaftlichkeit.
I did poke a hole in one of his definitions one day thereby prompting his addition of a codicil.
But when I questioned his paraphrastic method, I got, not quite the incredulous state, but the blank stare. For I had had the temerity to question one of his central metaphilosophical presuppositions.