Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Autobiographical

  • A Vocation, not a Job

    Heading out the door for a walk, the wife invited me along. I told her I had too much to do, that the clock was running, the format sudden death, the time-control unknown.  "But you're retired." I reminded her that philosophy is my vocation.  One can be retired from the largely meaningless job of teaching…

  • I Didn’t Start Out Conservative

    Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one.  My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41.  I came of age in the '60s.  One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a…

  • The Introvert Advantage

    Social distancing?  I've been doing it all my life. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!  Happy solitude, the sole beatitude. How sweet it is, and made sweeter still by a little socializing. Full lockdown?  I could easily take it, and put it to good use.  It provides an excellent excuse to avoid meaningless holiday socializing with…

  • Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

    A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was:…

  • Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia, Asia Minor

    From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996: Phaselis is a romantic tangle of Graeco-Roman ruins in a beautiful natural setting. I hiked back into the brush, got scratched up, but was rewarded by ruins and views out to the Mediterranean, and up to snow-capped mountains. From Phaselis to the resort town of Kemer. I am…

  • Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? Part I

    I met with Steven Nemes recently for a productive and intense discussion of people, politics, religion, and in particular the metaphysics of individuality and possibility.  I think of Nemes as my 'philosophical grandson.' Although never formally my student, he discovered my A Paradigm Theory of Existence when he was a freshman at Arizona State University,…

  • Rebel with a Cause

    "The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard." Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards.  I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort…

  • The Hyphenated American

    One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to…

  • The Old Man Wakes Up . . .

    . . . from the first nap of the day to the soothing strains of The Who. Two minutes into it, he's banging on all eight, the iced coffee is working its reliable quotidian magic, and soon after some more of this bloggity-blog ephemera, and a few 3-min Internet chess games, he will be ready…

  • The Most Boring Philosophers

    Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed,  no subject is boring except to the bored who make it  so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is…

  • Cognitive Dissonance on Good Friday

    It was Good Friday. I was 11 or 12 years old, possibly 13. I was with the boy next door, also raised Catholic.  He wanted to play. It was around two in the afternoon. Christ had been on the cross for two hours according to the account we had been taught. I recall to this…

  • The Great Blizzard of ’78 and How I Got my Dissertation Done

    Reader Josh E. asks for tips on how to get a dissertation done. Here is how I did it. …………………………………… I had an odd schedule in those days.  I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight.  I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the…

  • Are You an Introvert? Take this Test!

    This is a re-post from April 2012 with minor edits and additions. ………………………… The bolded material below is taken verbatim from Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (Crown 2012), p. 13.  I then give my responses.  The more affirmative responses, the more of an introvert you are. 1. I prefer one-on-one…

  • Life’s Fugacity

    As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the…

  • A Cure for Infatuation?

    One of the very best is marriage.  Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.* But while infatuation lasts, it…