Morgenbesser in response to B.F. Skinner: “Are you telling me it’s wrong to anthropomorphize people?”
During campus protests of the 1960s, Sidney Morgenbesser was hit on the head by police. When asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly, he responded that it was ‘unjust, but not unfair. It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but not unfair because they hit everyone else over the head.’
When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied, ‘It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.’
What does this fairly wide array of well-known philosophers (save perhaps Rosen): Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Alvin Goldman, Daniel M. Hausman, Robert Nozick, Gideon Rosen, Naomi Zack, and Michael Stocker [apologies to those who might also have been included in this list], have in common?
I was startled to learn that they were all students of the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser (September 22, 1921 – August 1, 2004), who seems to have exemplified what it means to be both a Socratic gadfly and a Socratic midwife, although The New York Times Magazine dubbed him the “Sidewalk Socrates” (cf. Socrates in the agora). Inspired by and synthesizing these characterizations, I’m inclined to believe his pedagogical methods were maieutic, therapeutic, and dialectic, incarnating the philosophically metaphorical equivalent of “street medicine.” Morgenbesser was a Jewish American philosopher (as Geuss notes, ‘Sidney had had rabbinical training at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and had one time been attracted by a movement called ‘Reconstructionist Judaism’….) and professor at Columbia University who “wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms … and humor.” His “areas of expertise included the philosophy of social science, political philosophy, epistemology, and the history of American pragmatism,” co-founding “the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs [the journal of which is Philosophy & Public Affairs] along with G.A. Cohen, Thomas Nagel and others.”
While recognizing the name but knowing next to nothing about him, I looked up information on Morgenbesser after reading Raymond Geuss’s discussion of his philosophical ideas (‘a great admirer of the pragmatism of John Dewey’) and the profound influence it appears to have had on Geuss himself as revealed in his book, Who Needs a World View? (Harvard University Press, 2020), even though, as he writes—when Geuss was no longer a student but now a colleague—“Sidney and I eventually had a terminal falling out.”
The above encomia were reinforced when I read in the Preface to Arthur C. Danto’s Narration and Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 1985 [revised ed. of Analytical Philosophy of History, 1968]) that Morgenbesser was a “close friend and colleague” of Danto whom he describes as “a man of warmth, wit, and extraordinary philosophical acuity.” Furthermore, “His own submission to the highest standards of philosophical integrity stands as a kind of conscience upon all who know him.” Elsewhere, in a memorial notice on Morgebesser’s death, Danto writes he “heard secondhand that someone said that while I did philosophy, Sidney lived philosophy.”
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