Today is the birthday (97 yrs!) of Herbert Fingarette. The late Robert C. Solomon wrote that “Herbert Fingarette has long been one of the most original and provocative philosophers in America.” As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I was a Teaching Assistant (TA) for Fingarette’s introductory course on Asian philosophies (with Mary I. Bockover, now a philosophy professor at Humboldt State University in norther California), the first graduate student from outside the Philosophy Dept. chosen to be a TA (I was downstairs in Religious Studies), owing to a recommendation (solicited by Fingarette) from Ninian Smart (whom I miss dearly), a fact I remain perversely proud of.
Fingarette has penned philosophical works on a wide variety of subjects with remarkable clarity and insight, some of them now “classics” in their respective areas of inquiry (e.g., the books on self-deception, Confucius, and alcoholism). He struck me as uncommonly kind, at least for a professional philosopher. I’ll cite just two instances of this kindness that came quickly to mind (after many years!): offering me a ride into town on more than one occasion upon learning I commuted by bicycle and bus to the university, and answering a late night phone call (as if we were having a convivial conversation in his office at school) about analogical reasoning and correlative thinking I had after reading A.C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (Open Court, 1989). Happy birthday Professor Fingarette!
Books by Herbert Fingarette (one title with co-author Ann Fingarette Hasse, his daughter, an attorney):
- The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and the Life of the Spirit (Basic Books, 1963).
- Self-Deception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969; 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2000).
- Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (HarperSanFrancisco, 1972).
- The Meaning of Criminal Insanity (University of California Press, 1972).
- Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).
- Death: Philosophical Soundings (Open Court, 1999).
- Mapping Responsibility: Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture (Open Court, 2004).
- (co-author, Ann Fingarette Hasse) Mental Disabilities and Criminal Responsibility (University of California Press, 1979).
See too: Mary I. Bockover, ed. Rituals, Rules and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette (Open Court, 1991).
From his Wikipedia entry:
“Herbert Fingarette [b. January 20, 1921 (age 97)] is an American philosopher and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [….] Fingarette’s work deals with issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, ethics, law, and Chinese philosophy.
In his 1969 [Routledge & Kegan Paul; 2nd edition, University of California Press, 2000] monograph Self-Deception, Fingarette presents an account of the titular concept influenced by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sören Kierkegaard and Sigmund Freud, as well as contemporary work in physiology and analytic philosophy. Fingarette argues that traditional accounts of self-deception fall invariably into paradox because these accounts see self-deception in terms of perception or knowledge. Such paradoxes may be resolved, Fingarette claims, by re-framing self-deception as a problem of volition and action. On these new terms, he defines self-deception as an agent’s persistent refusal to ‘spell out’ (explicitly acknowledge) and to avow some aspect of her engagement in the world.
Fingarette’s 1972 monograph Confucius: The Secular as Sacred was described in a peer-reviewed academic journal as ‘one of the most significant philosophical books on the subject to be published in a long time.’
Fingarette has also influentially applied his work in moral psychology to pressing social and legal issues, particularly those surrounding addiction. In his 1988 book Heavy Drinking, Fingarette gainsays the disease theory of alcoholism popularized by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.” [embedded hyperlinks courtesy of yours truly]
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