Recently, I’ve been going through back issues of Proceedings and Addresses, the official publication of the American Philosophical Association. A given issue will contain programs and announcements for the current meetings, and Memorial Minutes, which of course means obituaries for colleagues recently deceased. I’ve been saving some of the obits and discarding the rest of the rest of the back issues. 

In the process, I’ve read some of these farewells for the first time, including writeups of people I didn’t know had died. Some of the eulogies brought to mind what my father’s cousin Ethel had said about the flowery flattery at one such putting-to-rest event she attended:

I wanted to pick up the lid to see

if I was at the right funeral.

I found one colleague, of whose death I hadn’t heard, extolled to the highest heaven by two other colleagues. There isn’t one member of the mutually congratulatory threesome who I would ask to hold my watch while I took a shower. But there were the two survivors, describing the colleague who has now left us: What a paragon! Such a privilege to have lived when he was alive!

Well, I’m sure glad they didn’t ask me to write the obit. He’d been deployed, at one point during my seven-year job struggle, to evaluate my teaching hour. After observing my class, he’d suggested that we get together for dinner. With apparent appreciation, he listened as I discussed my overall approach to teaching philosophy. The next time we met, it was at the follow-up conference with the chairperson. Turned out, he guessed that my confidences at dinner would resemble things I would also say at the follow-up conference. So he had his ready-made rebuttals all prepared. It was the equivalent of a sucker punch: with an inviting smile, you draw your target in close enough so that your fist gets at the wide-open and unguarded middle directly. 

I turn now to the fulsome Memorial Minute for a Fearless Feminist. Let’s call her Janet. Before I joined the Department, Janet had prompted two other women colleagues to invite me to meet them all for lunch, because “the women of the Department” wanted to get together with me separately from my official interview. During the lunch, no one laid out for me specific cases where faculty or student women had been treated unfairly. Generic unfairness was simply assumed. Well, I did not like to have my support enlisted before I knew what the issues were. 

Janet asserted that the bloc she opposed (the ones who’d conducted my official interview) would expect me to be their lackey. I responded that they’d be disappointed because I’m nobody’s lackey. She of course interpreted me to be saying that I would be hers.

Later, unsurprisingly, it turned out that the support she expected did not concern any issues I could identify as significant to women. Her expectation had been a lot simpler than that: merely that I would vote for her bloc in a divided Department. When for unrelated reasons I did not turn out to vote her way, she became a bitter and dedicated enemy.

Eventually, after my seven-year job struggle, in which she figured in certain key and colorful episodes, I was reinstated with tenure. It was during my first days back at the college that Janet spotted me having lunch in the faculty cafeteria. She walked over to my table to tell me sincerely –

“You deserve tenure in hell!”

I’m not that great at pithy rejoinders, so here’s all I could think of:

“Janet!  That’s a terrible thing to say!”

Pretty lame, eh?

There was one obit I clipped where I will use the real name: that of my friend Ed Erwin. Here’s one story about Ed that will give you an idea of his character. At the time when we were colleagues in the Stony Brook branch of the State University of New York, I gave a talk with the title “Why Women’s Liberation?” In those days, the topic was still fairly new. I wore a black mini-dress with black tights and boots for the occasion and spiced it up at the end with songs for The Movement composed and sung by me. My friend Fred the Drifter provided the guitar accompaniment. Anyway, the auditorium was filled and applause at the end was thunderous. One of my students came up afterwards to tell me, “I have never heard you so eloquent!”  

Ed was standing nearby saying nothing, so I asked him what he thought of my paper.  

“I thought it was a very poor paper,” he replied. So when I say that Ed was truthful, believe me, I’ve earned the right to say it.

The writeup of Ed in Proceedings is a perfectly handsome appreciation that, for diplomatic reasons, omits the back story that may have hastened his death. Ed taught at the University of Miami. One of his colleagues was a visiting Brit named Colin McGinn. I haven’t read McGinn’s work but believe that he was generally respected in professional philosophy.

Accounts differ, about how exactly McGinn got himself into hot water. The story involved a 26-year-old graduate student with whom he had embarked on a questionable experiment, which they designated their “genius project.” It seems to have included freedom – mainly verbal – from inhibitions. The supposed purpose of all the talking-dirty was to unleash her latent power to function at the “genius” level. Sounds real dumb, but their written communications indicate that, while it lasted, the experiment was a mutual one. Perhaps it began as mutual but later was felt by her to depend on the disparity of power between the two. Another issue was some work he expected her to do that she was not doing. Anyway, whatever the mix of motives on both sides, at last she put in an official complaint of sexual harassment. As a consequence, McGinn’s reputation, career and association with the Miami Department went into free fall.

Ed Erwin’s part in the story I have only from Ed himself, so it risks one-sidedness. But I knew him to be a truthful man. Someone – investigator or reporter – asked Ed how he rated McGinn as a philosopher. Ed and McGinn did not work in the same philosophic areas nor had they been personally close. Nevertheless, Ed said candidly that he considered McGinn to be a good philosopher. Ed’s refusal to lie when it would have been convenient proved very costly professionally. He was removed from graduate-level teaching, from departmental committees, and other functions common to collegial life. I suspect that his final illness was the last and highest cost of Ed’s constitutional unwillingness to lie.

Ed Erwin was a good man

and a credit

to professional philosophy.

What’s the upshot? What’s the moral of Abigail’s unwritten obits? Philosophy is supposed to require the pursuit of truth. But it’s so easy to lie.

Everybody talkin’ 

‘bout philosophy

ain’t goin’ there.