In 1966, just out of graduate school, I got a job at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut. These were the days when co-education was only just becoming a serious possibility, though not actual at Yale till 1969, after I left; so all my students were boys, mainly from private boys’ schools. I heard them discussing very seriously whether they would still be able to pay attention at all in class if there were girls in the room.
But in the sixties even at Yale there were some murmurs of revolt, though at that time not yet against the Vietnam war. There was a dress code, jacket and tie at all meals. For the first time in Yale’s history there was dissent, even some protest. On one such occasion some of the boys showed up in jacket, tie, and T-shirt, others in a jacket with the sleeves torn off.
The philosophy department was large and very diverse, philosophically; it had been built up with a zoo-director’s ideal of having at least one, but not more than two, specimens of each species. So I certainly can’t talk here about all my colleagues, but some stand out. In philosophy of science we had the famous Norwood Russell Hanson (he would need a whole post of his own). On the other extreme there was a youngish man that I would often come across on the campus, walking with an umbrella, wearing a long raincoat, regardless of weather. No matter how I approached or said hello, we never reached the point of eye contact. So all I have is hearsay, in all likelihood not too trustworthy. He had come to the campus as a freshman at age 18, and never left. His undergraduate thesis was on Love in 19th century philosophy, his master’s thesis on Love in the German Romantics, his dissertation on Love in Schelling and Schleiermacher. Now he taught German philosophy and was said to have just had his first date. We must assume that he was well prepared, but nothing further was known.
We had a then (or perhaps a bit previously) famous metaphysician, Paul Weiss. Yale is not a simple entity, it is actually a cluster of residential colleges, each being a dormitory with a well-appointed suite for the Master as well as rooms for some favored, single, presumed to be celibate, faculty. Paul Weiss had the penthouse of one of the modern colleges, I think it was Ezra Stiles, architecturally famous, designed by Eero Saarinen (a Yale graduate, naturally).
There Weiss held his soirees. I think it was Tuesday evenings, or perhaps Wednesdays. Many of us went quite often. There would be sherry and biscuits, and Weiss would say something to guide the evening, like “I have been thinking … [thoughtful pause] … about the Problem of the One and the Many …” Even die-hard empiricists and cutting edge analytics could be heard entering into the problem. If an animal has many parts, what makes it one thing? A unity rather than a multitude? Or the universe, what principle of unity makes it one? (Maybe I am not getting this right …. it was all rather obscure, and yet the dialectical moves in the game were obvious..)
Paul Weiss was a bit touchy and most certainly feisty, quite appropriate for someone of small stature so often in the midst of a critical crowd. I had written a footnote to the effect that for my view about the Excluded Middle I considered myself in good company, “as witnessed by Quine, who mentions Paul Weiss, Yale University, as having been brought “to the desperate extremity of entertaining Aristotle’s fantasy that ‘It is true that p or q’ is an insufficient condition for ‘It is true that p or it is true that q’.” Weiss confronted me about this, how was he to take that? I assured him it was meant as a compliment, on my part, even if not on Quine’s. He still looked at me a little doubtfully.
“Tell me” he said, “You are a logician. Isn’t it true that logic is very hard?” I grinned a bit and said that all the students thought so. “Ah”, he said, “but isn’t it true that the more you practice and study logic, the easier it becomes?”
I nodded assent. Weiss suddenly stood up on tiptoe. “That is the difference between metaphysics and logic! Metaphysics never becomes any easier!” He looked wicked in triumph.
But my favorite metaphysician was Frederick Benton Fitch. He was also the main logician, and an extremely careful person: any system he created had to be provably consistent — regardless of cost. Part of the cost. which he happily took to heart, was that he must therefore work on the most foundational of logics, combinatory logic (at that time taught in only two places in America, the other being Penn State). For however careful and prudent, Fitch was nothing if not a maverick in matters of the intellect.
In person Fitch seemed to me the paradigm of a Southern gentleman. Unlike — in my experience — most logicians, Fitch was a gentle, conservative, courteous, quiet person. Dress code remained permanent in his life, I cannot imagine him in shirtsleeves. For personal idiosyncrasies he was only known to be cultivating flesh-eating plants, which he fed the aphids from his wife’s rose garden. What was remarkable, though, was something he explained at our very first luncheon on campus.
“I do believe that I will go to heaven”, he said, “for I have done something for God. I have proved his existence.”
I wasn’t at all sure that he was not joking with me. But he continued, “Each spring I teach metaphysics, and the entire course leads up to the proof of God’s existence, in the last week.” This was all entirely straight-faced, and so was the disappointment he then expressed: that in the current version of the proof, God turned out to be a relation.
His commentator Charles Baylis at the APA, where Fitch had presented his views, said that he did not see anything worthy of worship in such a God. Fitch retorted that he would not elaborate on his conception (form? practice?) of worship. There is no doubt that Fitch worked conscientiously on his metaphysical system, and still, I could never quite lose my suspicion, that he was just secretly smiling to himself.
APPENDIX
About co-education: The Harvard Crimson reported on November 15, 1968 that “Yale President Kingman Brewster announced yesterday that Yale will become coeducational in September 1969. The announcement came shortly after the Yale faculty approved with only one dissenting vote a plan to admit 250 freshman women plus 250 upperclass women by transfer. Eventually 1500 women will be admitted in addition to the 4000 male students.”
There had been controversies at all the ivy-league universities and colleges, beginning already with the desire of students to be less constrained by curfew in the dormitories. When someone argued that students could not do anything after midnight that they could not do before, the president of Bryn Mawr famously retorted “Yes, but they could do it again!”
About Vietnam protest: The Yale Daily News of March28, 2001: “Protest season didn’t hit Yale until May Day 1970, but the next few years were full of action.” On other campuses anti-Vietnam protests had begun in 1965. But the Yale chaplain, who became a leader of the anti-war movement, recalled some student involvement (possibly in the protests in nearby New York City?) some years before 1970.
Elsewhere there are reports of several Yale faculty being involved in the anti-war movement as early as 1965, when Lyndon Johnson ordered the direct involvement of American troops in Vietnam.
For more about Frederick Fitch there are several posts on my other blog.
Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book 