I hadn’t heard from Ed since right after his unexpected surgery. He’d sent me a technicolor headshot showing how he looked when post-operative. Pretty banged up. I didn’t realize that it would be his wordless explanation for ending further communication between us. He was a convinced empiricist: what the senses present is how it is. If you don’t look like yourself anymore, why pretend you still are yourself or ask old friends to pretend with you?

Not being half so committed to empiricism, I didn’t see it that way, and for some time tried to stay in touch, but it was no use. Till the other day, belatedly picking up the November 2023 issue of Proceedings and Addresses, the professional journal of the philosophers. That’s where you find the prize-winning speeches coast to coast, the presidential addresses at Eastern, Central and Pacific Division Meetings, and the Memorial Minutes. As usual, I turned first to the Memorial Minutes. Anybody I know?

And there was Ed, with a face more austere than I remember. The writeup, by his colleague Mark Rowlands on behalf of the University of Miami’s Philosophy Department, was appreciative and accurate, though it left out a back story to be filled in here.

To frame a portrait of Ed’s honesty, I’ll cite one case where I’m in the picture. We were young colleagues at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, when I decided to give a paper titled “Why Women’s Liberation?” Such a paper was ground-breaking back then, so I decided to make my debut as a feminist as smashing as I could. I came on stage in a black mini-dress, black tights and boots and wound it up with songs, composed by me for the occasion, also sung by me, my buddy Fred-the-drifter playing guitar on stage alongside me. In that large auditorium, the crowd filled every seat and gave it a sustained ovation. One of my students came up afterward to tell me, “I have never heard you so eloquent!”

Afterward, as we prepared to drive Fred to the station, I asked Ed what he thought. “I thought it was a very poor paper,” he said, in his one-note, low-affect voice. (Eventually, after considerable rewriting from me, retitled “Feminism Without Contradictions,” my paper appeared in The Monist, a well-regarded philosophy journal.) When, years later, I reminded Ed of what he’d said, he was a little embarrassed. In fact, I had not been in the least offended. He’d paid me the compliment of assuming that what I wanted from him was a truthful answer!

At a later time, Ed investigated the empirical evidence for the Freudian claims. He sent me an essay he’d written that summarized all the rigorous studies of Freud’s claims then available. The conclusion Ed came to was that psychoanalysis gave no better results for its clientele than other treatment modalities – or no treatments at all!

As I wrote in Dear Abbie, “I took these results to my shrink right away, fully expecting him to expose the methodological flaws of that study. … What he laid out by way of counter-argument was a pastiche of evasions. It happens that I can tell a bad argument when I hear one. Accordingly, I quit him.”

Later I shared my experience with Ed. Here’s what he wrote back: “When I started teaching at Stony Brook about half my academic friends were seeing a psychoanalyst; none showed any inclination of a mind change when I produced counter-evidence. Some of these people followed their shrink in August to his or her vacation spot.”

About then, Ed pronounced me “an empiricist.” Coming from him, I took it as a high compliment. There are other stories, as well as a respectable body of work in the field, but I’ll fast forward to Ed’s last acts as a working philosopher. 

One of his colleagues, a well-regarded English philosopher by the name of Colin McGinn, had invited one of McGinn’s doctoral candidates, a young woman in her twenties, to enter with him into an experimental relationship of a peculiar kind. (I know, I know; you’re tensing up already. An English philosopher friend commented that men of McGinn’s generation went to boys’ elite schools where they were socialized to be hopeless around women.) But back to McGinn and his advisee. To what kind of peculiar relationship did he invite her? As I understood it, there was no actual physical contact, but they agreed to get together for the purpose of breaking all kinds of verbal taboos. Does that mean, they got together to talk dirty? Well … I guess. I wasn’t there and I never got an authoritative description, but I got the sense of something like that. The projected result of this taboo-breaking would have been the achievement of psychological liberation. Imprudent as the “experiment” may have been, McGinn saw no reason why it should affect his duties as her thesis advisor. When she turned in work that he thought required revision, he sent her off to redo it.

Instead, she made a complaint to whatever powers were in charge of sex harassment. I don’t know the details, but McGinn was punished in all the ways an academic can be punished nowadays. Ed wrote, “Despite not being charged with sexual harassment and his world-wide renown, and sterling publication record, he has been unable to find an academic job anywhere. He has also been blacklisted in publishing and prevented from speaking at conferences.”

Ed never defended McGinn’s not-so-great “experiment” with his 26-year-old graduate student. But he did not believe that the heavens had fallen on that sole account (whoever is without sin is free to cast the first stone) – and he refused to deny McGinn’s otherwise unblemished record in academic philosophy. In this refusal to lie or to duck, Ed stood alone. Although he and McGinn prevailed in a later lawsuit brought by the young woman, and Ed drew an apologetic retraction from a colleague who subsequently circulated a totally unfounded accusation of a different kind against him, nevertheless the combined denunciations sabotaged his professional life. 

He wrote me: “My career as a teacher of graduate students ended … and my isolation in the department began … . No graduate student in the last 5 years has taken a course with me, asked me to write a letter of recommendation, or placed me on a dissertation committee. When I asked {the colleague] why she had forwarded this false accusation without supporting evidence, she replied that the accusation itself was evidence of its truth. [This was the false accusation for which, too late, the colleague apologized to Ed.] After I sent our graduate students a message on academic freedom, they responded by telling me to stop my immoral behavior and to never again write them on this topic.”

Ed thought that the professional bludgeoning had hastened the death of Pat, his beloved wife. I no longer recall what further steps Ed planned to take in his own defense or how far he’d gotten at the time of the sudden illness that killed him in turn.

Philosophy as a serious pursuit began in the love Plato immortalized in dialogues that showed Socrates, his teacher, in speech and action. The love of wisdom naturally becomes the love of those who seek it for those who have it. To have it, and to seek it, is to remain truthful.

That’s what Ed did.