Walter writes, re Malcolm's writing 'Meaning what, precisely?' in the margin of one of my papers
If he were as good a teacher as he was a philosopher, I don't think he'd agree with your reading of the marginalia.
The conditional may be true but the consequent still seems to me false. There was nothing, I'm sure, that I could have done to clarify that particular piece of opacity. Malcolm was a harsh man, and we were mostly afraid of him. What one learned from him was a particular kind of seriousness, which one could easily mistake for stubborness. In Kantian terms, he scared the hell out of us.
You missed a good opportunity to clarify your thought for him and then see what his response would have been. Sarcasm and rhetorical questions do not belong in professional feedback to students on their work.
True, all true, although I think it would have been beyond my powers to have transformed nonsense into sense. You and I believe that sarcasm, etc., don't belong in an evaluation of student work, but this was over fifty years ago, and students' feelings were not the main concern of professors.
Malcolm did give me some very generous praise on the paper I wrote for him at the end of my first semester, and this more than anything else gave me some hope at the time. One of my fellow students wrote in the conclusion of a paper for him that there probably wasn't much that was original in what she'd said. Malcolm's comment was 'Your spelling is your own.'
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
