{"id":2346,"date":"2021-11-12T17:00:04","date_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/11\/12\/remembering-quentin-smith\/"},"modified":"2021-11-12T17:00:04","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:00:04","slug":"remembering-quentin-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/11\/12\/remembering-quentin-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Quentin Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

My old friend died on this date last year. If in your life you find one truly kindred soul, then you are lucky indeed. Quentin was that soul for me.  This piece<\/a> captures the man.  <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who\u2019s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia. The kind of philosophy professor who is<\/em> supposed to exist, the one who responds to emails promptly and knows how to tie a tie and writes just enough articles that 10 other specialists in his tiny sub-sub area will read to jump through all the hoops of tenure and promotion but doesn\u2019t lose enough sleep over the underlying philosophical problems to distract himself from pursuing from the PMC rat race, has some real virtues. That professor will be more responsible than Quentin seems to have been about grading. The cleaning staff won\u2019t be overly troubled by the state of that other professor\u2019s office. And that other professor definitely<\/em> won\u2019t miss as many classes as Quentin did through absent-minded preoccupation with actual, inner philosophical contemplation. Hell, that other professor probably gets to class 15 minutes early just in case there\u2019s a problem with his PowerPoint.<\/span><\/p>\n

Quentin was more like one of the rail-riding \u201cZen lunatics\u201d that Jack Kerouac wrote about in his novel Dharma Bums<\/em>. Or like Diogenes, the philosopher who ate in the marketplace, shat in the theater, and slept in a giant ceramic jar in the middle of Athens. Quentin was pretty much who Santayana had in mind when he said that the ideal job for a philosopher wasn\u2019t professor of philosophy at a university but tender of umbrellas at some unfrequented museum.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My old friend died on this date last year. If in your life you find one truly kindred soul, then you are lucky indeed. Quentin was that soul for me.  This piece captures the man.   Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who\u2019s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia. The kind of … Continue reading “Remembering Quentin Smith”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,145,198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-obituaries","category-tributes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}