{"id":7519,"date":"2014-12-13T05:38:42","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T05:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/13\/the-delight-of-the-find\/"},"modified":"2014-12-13T05:38:42","modified_gmt":"2014-12-13T05:38:42","slug":"the-delight-of-the-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/13\/the-delight-of-the-find\/","title":{"rendered":"The Delight of the ‘Find’"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the pleasures in the life of a bookman is the delight of the 'find.' As a reader reports:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I saw that your cat is named Max Black. You might appreciate this anecdote.<\/span><\/p>\n

Twice a year here in Ithaca there is a three-week long used book sale. The price drops each week, so if you can hold out to the end you can make out with some really good deals. This past time I got Hempel's Aspects of Scientific Explanation<\/em> and Peter Geach's Reference and Generality<\/em> for 50 cents each! The best find of all, though, was a first edition of [Hans] Reichenbach's classic The Rise of Scientific Philosophy <\/em>that bore the signature of its previous owner on the inside: Max Black!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Great story!  Curiously, I acquired all three titles similarly and for pennies: either from used book bins or from former graduate students.  Back in '76 or '77 in Freiburg, Germany, I found a book by Hans Lipps that had been in Heidegger's library and bore his inscription.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have often regretted the books that I didn't snatch from the remainder bins.  Or rather it is my not snatching them that I regret.  My mind drifts back to my impecunious days as a graduate student in Boston, must have been '73 or '74.  I was in Harvard Square where I espied Reinhardt Grossmann's Ontological Reduction<\/em>, or maybe it was his early book on Frege.  I didn't buy it and I still regret not doing so.
<\/span><\/p>\n

I have repeatedly had the experience of buying a book the subject matter of which did not particularly interest me at the time only to find that a year or ten or twenty later that very book was what I needed. My copy of C. L. Hamblin's Fallacies<\/em>  (Methuen 1970) was pulled from a used book den in Harvard Square  in July of 1974.  It sat on my shelf unread for four years until I devoured it while boning up to teach logic, one of my duties at my first job.<\/span><\/p>\n

I searched for an image of Max Black and  found this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Max<\/a>I did not name my cat after this acolyte of high culture.  Here is the real Max Black, the philosopher after whom I named my cat, circa 1965:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Max<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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One of the pleasures in the life of a bookman is the delight of the 'find.' As a reader reports: I saw that your cat is named Max Black. You might appreciate this anecdote. Twice a year here in Ithaca there is a three-week long used book sale. The price drops each week, so if … Continue reading “The Delight of the ‘Find’”<\/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":[92,389,289],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-bibliophilia","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519","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=7519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}