My brother Tom and I, Walden Pond, April 2000. I thought I had a picture from the day before I moved away from Boston of a post-thunderstorm Walden Pond, but I can't find it. Instead, here is a photo of my handsome brother and of your favorite philosophy student taken over four years ago. My brother is the gent with the sunglasses. That's me in the white sweater. It's not a great photo, but it scanned Okay. I miss Boston a lot sometimes. A very good friend of mine sent me a postcard from Walden Pond last week, since he was there on the fourth of July. Luckily for me, Boston is the city in the world with the greatest density of colleges and universities. I have a feeling that I might go back for a little while. Getting a one or two year teaching stint somewhere up there after I finish my PhD here in Illinois would be fantastic. Perhaps I can get a grant to go to Harvard and work on William James and Emerson for a bit. It's not unheard of. Well, Boston is the one city aside from Baltimore where I would be willing to settle. I should wrap this up, however, lest this post turn into a chronology of my two years in Beantown, complete with lovely memories of life on the shore and of the myriad of bookstores...
3 comments:
Why not Charles Sanders Pearce? He's kind of the unsung, yet suddenly fashionable, pragmatist, isn't he?
TPB, Esq.
tpb3jd@att.net
Peirce is definite a cool guy; you're right about that. But Harvard
never did anything with his papers, after Peirce's widow sold them to
Harvard after Charles died for $500. Now they're at Indiana
University, where they are working on a critical edition.
(http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/)They have two volumes of the "essential
Peirce" out, if you are interested.
ISBNs:
Vol I--0253328497
Vol II--0253211905
SIU Carbondale is one of the few (very few) hotbeds of pragmatism
around, and we only have one Peirce scholar.
I think the hottest pragmatist is still Dewey, though I like both
Peirce and James better myself. We have the Dewey Center at SIU, and I
sometimes don't see what the all huff is about. Though I've taken two seminars with the director of the Center, and he is a hell of a smart man -- and a nice guy to boot.
My old advisor from BC
HATES pragmatism, especially James. He told me to read Peirce more.
I'm rambling.
Sorry.
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