The Jewish Atheist

You don't have to believe in God, you only have to do what He says!

Peter Lipton was head of HPS at Cambridge for a number of years until his sudden death from an undiagnosed cardiac condition in November 2007. He was much loved. (Perhaps I should start a new series called Understatement of The Week, with this as its first entry.)

I remember once sitting in on a graduate student seminar Lipton was running in HPS. One of the students produced a particularly feeble offering, having clearly done no work and taken no thought. If it had been me running the seminar the young man would assuredly have received the bollocking he so clearly and richly deserved. That was not Peter's way: instead he extracted from the offering what fragments of good sense there were, tidied them up, unified them and presented the result to the speaker as tho' it were his own work. Not a single unkind word was spoken. And who is to say that the young man did not learn as much from this experience as he would have learnt from a bollocking from me?

Peter was an honest man and he had strong opinions, but his life and career is witness to the fact that it is possible to go through life being both true to yourself and acting forcefully on the world without pissing anyone off. Why can't we all be like that?

Actually, while we are about it i s'pose i should tell another Lipton story.
We were agreeing that Quine's autobiography was quite astonishingly boring. How could such an intelligent, interesting, thoughtful and widely-travelled man write such a stupefyingly boring autobiography?? It's actually a rather interesting question. Lipton said

``I have a theory about that''

``Go on!''

``It's because you never get the feeling reading that book that the author ever lay awake at night worrying about any philosophical question''.

I think that's true, but if that's the explanation it must be beco's it means that there is no mental life on offer for the reader to engage with.

Of course the other—famously—boring autobiography is Mein Kampf. I tried to read it once but i couldn't get beyond about page ten.

Not that i am comparing Quine with Hitler(!!)

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