Morgenbesser
This is from an obit in today’s Times magazine (actually, it’s their annual “The lives they lived” or whatever it’s called thing) of Sidney Morgenbesser:
The New York Times > Magazine > Sidney Morgenbesser, b. 1921: Sidewalk Socrates
Armed with logic and distinctions and conceptual clarity, he tirelessly patrolled the borders of truth. Large, sweeping theories made him suspicious. ('’To explain why a man slipped on a banana peel,'’ he argued, ‘’we do not need a general theory of slipping.'’) In place of grand systems, he cultivated a set of attitudes, ways of thinking about ideas — a sense of what it is to really, truly think. Not for nothing did Robert Nozick, the late Harvard philosopher, claim that as a student at Columbia he ‘’majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.'’
I like that. A set of attitudes — it seems to me that that’s what the social sciences are all about, rather than rigorous theorizing. I’m not saying there’s no theorizing, or there shouldn’t be any, but in terms of grand theories, I’ll prefer Morgenbesser’s corrosive skepticism any time.
Morgenbesser was not a brute skeptic, but as a former believer who had lost and never recovered his faith, he understood that the truth was hard; hard to come by, and sometimes hard — even painful — to take. ‘’Why is God making me suffer so much?'’ he asked in the final weeks of his life, as he struggled with complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease. ‘’Just because I don’t believe in him?'’
