[lit-ideas] Re: "The Causal Theory of Perception"
- From: Paul Stone <pastone@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:30:54 -0400
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Robert Paul<rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> In a post to PHILOSOP, I think, R. Paul shared the obit of R. Albritton
>> from the San Francisco Chronicle.
>> I read it, and I circulated elsewhere.
>
> I did not send an obituary of Albritton to PHILOSOP; I don't even
> remember reading one there.
>
> Wearily,
>
> Robert Paul
Robert,
I think the one JLS is thinking of is yours from June 10, 2002 to
Phil-Lit which you DID post, and which did end with the aforementioned
quote about him being 'gay' as JL puts it.
Here is the obit:
<begin>
"Los Angeles -- Rogers Albritton, a charismatic philosopher who rarely
published his work yet dazzled colleagues of diverse persuasions with
his lucid analyses of fundamental human dilemmas, has died. He was 78.
The former UCLA and Harvard University professor died May 21 of
pneumonia at UCLA Medical Center. A heavy smoker for most of his life,
he had emphysema and had been in declining health.
Called a philosopher's philosopher, he was considered one of the most
formidable intellects in his field. His respected stature, however,
stemmed not from his writings but from what philosopher and film
critic Stanley Cavell called "the charisma of conversation alone."
He was famous for marathon conversations about philosophy. A
discussion lasting six or eight hours was not unusual. A former
graduate student once reported talking with Mr. Albritton for 11
hours.
In such encounters, the lean and stylish Princeton-trained thinker
loved nothing more than to explore such vexing matters as the nature
of evil, free will or reality. Conversing with him was not like
sitting downstream of a flood; he did not lecture. Rather, he probed
gently, asking many questions in Socratic fashion to illuminate hidden
dimensions of a philosophical problem.
Famously nondoctrinaire, even though he was an expert on the Greeks
and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was averse to ever declaring that a
problem was solved.
He could argue that a person had no way of knowing whether he was
asleep or awake, then conclude the opposite after more hours of
laughter-filled discussion.
"He was a kind of philosophical conscience," said philosopher Thomas
Nagel, an Albritton student who now teaches at New York University.
"Almost all of the rest of us fall back on the stuff we think we've
established. Rogers was a reminder that you can never dispense with
the obligation to actively think whatever you're thinking and be
prepared to think it through from the beginning."
Over four decades of teaching, Mr. Albritton published about four
papers, none considered definitive. Most appeared before he left a
tenured position at Harvard to join the philosophy faculty at UCLA in
1972.
Mr. Albritton was born in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 15, 1923. When he
was 3, his father Errett, a physiologist, and mother Rietta, a
chemist, moved the family to Bangkok, where the father founded a
medical school with a Rockefeller foundation grant.
Mr. Albritton completed his elementary and secondary schooling in
Maryland and Washington, D.C. At 15, he enrolled at Swarthmore
College, transferring two years later to St. John's College, the
Annapolis, Md., school famous for its emphasis on the Great Books.
There Mr. Albritton began his formal training in philosophy, focusing
on Plato and the Greeks. After two years with the Army Air Corp in
Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he earned his bachelor's
degree from St. John's and his doctorate, in 1955, from Princeton.
He taught briefly at Cornell University, then joined the Harvard
faculty in 1956. He chaired Harvard's philosophy department from 1963
to 1970.
He began to feel Cambridge was too strait-laced, and he was intrigued
by Los Angeles and its diversity. "My brother was gay and very
comfortable to let that be what it was," said Mr. Albritton's sister,
Heloise Frame, a New York psychotherapist. "He said at UCLA he could
be who he was. That was partly someone who didn't publish but was a
wonderful teacher. "
He came to UCLA for a year in 1972 and stayed.
--------------------------------------------------
[There's a trite obituary in the NY Times at
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/obituaries/10ALBR.html>]
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
