Digressions&Impressions

RIP: K.M. 'Micha' Schliesser (1938-2018)

My dad was born in the Summer of 1938 in Berlin; he was the only child of a businessman, Hermann Schliesser, and a fashion-designer, Margarete Neumann Schliesser (recall her drawings). After Kristallnacht later that Fall (recall) they left Germany for Holland. Until the age of seven, my dad grew up in Westerbork--first a refugee camp and then a German deportation camp (recall here; and here). After liberation, the family moved to Amsterdam, where, at once, they moved back into the fashion and women's ready-to-wear-business. Next to his bed was a picture of Hilde, a German fellow survivor, who lived near them at Merwedeplein. She became a surrogate mother to him while his parents were hard at work. He cared for another such surrogate, Lini Bunjes Rosenthal to the end of her life.

The stateless family became naturalized Dutch in 1950. The request was promoted and expedited by the Dutch ministry of economics, emphasizing the "international reputation" of the family. After a period in New York City  and Berlin, he joined the family business as fashion designer. In the 1970s, the manufacturing business was sold and he represented foreign women's ready-to-wear-manufacturers in the Netherlands.

When I was young, he did not speak much about his war-time experiences or what it was like being a foreign born native in Amsterdam after the war. But after his retirement, he became increasingly interested in sharing his stories in elementary and high schools. He emphasized the plight and vulnerability of refugees and was adamant about comparing his own family experiences to contemporary events. Last year, during one of his last school visits, he was very moved by his contact with kids who turned out to be Syrian refugees. In recent years, he was especially pleased by the warm welcome he received in Dortmund, Germany, striking up friendships with young people eager to confront Germany's past and pass it in to younger generations. It was in Dortmund that he finally learned the fate of Klausje Weinberg, his childhood friend from Westerbork (recall).

In New York he met my mom, Marleen Krieger. She was the youngest daughter of Abe Krieger, who had been a business associate and family friend of his father in Berlin before the war and Amsterdam after the war. It had been at Abe's suggestion that my dad moved to New York, where he studied at FIT. My mom and dad married in 1970. After the divorce, my younger sister (their only other child), Malka, ended up living with my dad. He raised her alone (with help of his loyal house-cleaner, Mevrouw Quist), and excelled at being Yiddishe mama and papa at once to her. He never remarried. When my sister had kids, -- Eli & Isa -- in turn, with her husband Ralph de Vries, he repeated the performance and became their trusted confidante, chauffeur, and partner in mischief.

My dad is proof that people can change at a later age. After retirement he got involved in various self-help courses, and started to become comfortable sharing his feelings and talking about his experiences. One means toward self-expression were his haunting bronze statues. (He had always regretted that he had not pursued a career in art and had joined the family business--and he encouraged both his kids to follow their passion. ) Briefly, it looked as if he would develop a second career as a sculptor, but one day he simply stopped. I asked him about this recently; and he said that even though he had paid the rent for the studio, he simply felt no need anymore. But he was pleased by the interest of his three grandchildren (Eli, Isa, Avi) in his artwork as they each picked a sculpture to remember him.

While he could have a biting, dry sense of humor, he developed many life-long friendships. Many of these shared his passion for bridge. And through them he stayed in touch with all the news in the kehila. 

He disliked aging; he found his physical fragility fearful -- a bad fall had lead to a hip replacement -- and the increasing lack of mobility annoying. But most of all he loathed the narrowing of his world as loved ones passed away. By the time his final disease was diagnosed, there was nothing that could be done. While my sister, brother-in-law, and I cared for him at home, during the last six weeks he amazed me by his spirit: he enjoyed meeting his friends and sharing memories; he was touched and genuinely surprised by the outpouring of fondness and love he received (and thoroughly enjoyed), including visits from all over the world. He returned this attention with astounding good cheer, tenderness, and mental lucidity, even though his body was visibly faltering.

Yesterday, after smoking a last cigarette, in the presence of my sister and myself, he died peacefully in his sleep.

 

RIP: Johan Cruyff: 1947-2016

De waarheid is nooit precies zoals je denkt dat hij zou zijn. [The truth is never exactly like you think he would be.]--Johan Cruyff.

The first professional soccer (voetbal) match I ever saw in person was at old the Olympic Stadium 7 november 1978. It was a good 30 minute walk from my childhood home, and my mom's friend, Max, took me. Max was the son of a sailor; he and his dad introduced me to sambal--an Indonesian hot sauce that I continue to adore. Unfortunately, Max died rather young.

The match, an arranged exhibit, marked the first official 'retirement' of Johan Cruyff and, simultaneously, ended the first golden age of Dutch football: Ajax of Amsterdam got completely outplayed (0-8) by Beckenbauer's Bayern Munchen. I went home in tears. (I was seven years old.) These days my dad lives next to the (renovated) stadium, although it is now more modest in size and not used for football anymore.

It's hard to explain the role of Johan Cruyff during the 1970s in Amsterdam and Barcelona. One year, my own club (AFC) took all the youth teams to the movies to see a special showing of Nummer 14--a 1973 documentary about Cruyff (see here, too). The title of the film was a reference to his shirt number. It caused a major crisis among my friends: would we go in the Ajax club colors, to honor our idol, or go in (the more stylish) AFC club colors. (I believe I opted for a mixed outfit.)

The documentary is a homage to the greatest club squad ever (the 1972 Ajax team). The best scene in the film is the one in which the annoying musical sound track is halted to show how the squad of my heroes is forced to run up the 'mountain' in het Amsterdamse bos (the Amsterdam forest), which was the huge depression era, man-made forest behind my childhood home. I always think of the scene when I bike by the forest or fly over it when I land at Schiphol.

Cruyff eventually resumed his career as a player, including a successful stint at arch-enemy Feyenoord, and, eventually, a manager. In his 30s, when I saw him play regularly, he had lost speed, but he still combined a velvet touch with on-pitch insight. He could make many much fitter and faster professional players look amateurish.

Like many kids of my generation, I was born 'too late.' We mostly missed out on the 60s and 70s in which Amsterdam was the center of the world (or so we were told); and we certainly missed the golden age of Ajax in the late 60s and early 70s; we spent most of our childhood hearing about the great club and national squads from older friends and relatives. This changed when Cruyff returned to Ajax to coach in the mid 1980s. He inherited a very talented, youthful team including a whole new generation of fantastic players (e.g., Menzo, Rijkaard and Van Basten), but he manifestly improved them, and I loved watching them develop in person. The team was uneven, but on its best days it could dazzle (including a memorable goal by Van Basten). Cruyff took them back to the near-elite of European footbal (including the cup winners cup). Even so, his greatest European managing triumph took place in Barcelona when he managed them to their first European Championship (in 1992).

As the years went by Cruyff became known for his oracular aphorisms uttered during TV interviews or commentary. Cruyff, who spoke in a distinctive Amsterdam working class accent that has now largely disappeared from Amsterdam, could compete with any Ancient sage with his philosophical nuggets. My favorite one has always been, Als ik zou willen dat je het begreep, had ik het wel beter uitgelegd, that is, "If I had wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better." (Another gem is Vaak moet er iets gebeuren voordat er iets gebeurt, "Often something has to happen before something happens.") In Holland, Elk nadeel heb z'n voordeel ("every disadvantage has its advantage") has entered the popular lexicon.

One final thought on the 1974 world cup final (recall also this post). During the last forty years, the Netherlands has fielded astoundingly talented national squads, including four others that had a legitimate shot at winning it all (and here I am leaving aside the most talented one that I saw self-destruct at San Siro in Milan in 1990). Cruyff has loomed so large in the national football imagination, that there has always been an underlying sense that, if Cruyff couldn't do it, it couldn't be done, until, of course, it will be done.  

 

RIP: Patrick Colonel Suppes, 1922–2014, Eulogy and Apologia

[This is a guest-post by Alistair Isaac.--ES]

The facts of Patrick Suppes’ career read like tall-tales of some 17^th century polymath.  In addition to philosophy, he held appointments in psychology, education, and statistics; he also made major contributions in the foundations of physics, linguistics, and the social sciences.  Although best known in philosophy for his work on philosophy of science, he wrote on topics as diverse as free will, liberty, meaning in poetry, corporal punishment, hylomorphism, and virtue ethics.[1]  He was also an entrepreneur, using the business of education—he taught with computers as soon as there were computers, and the internet as soon as there was an internet—to gather data for the science of education.  

Suppes occupied the same office in Ventura Hall for 60 years, eventually taking over the entire building, filling it with his collaborators.  When university expansion threatened it, he had Ventura Hall physically relocated rather than vacate.  When the (Suppes founded) Stanford Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) Online High School took off, there was no longer room for all his collaborators, so he turned architect and designed Nora Suppes Hall next door to house the OHS.  In the 2000s much of Ventura Hall was dedicated to Suppes’ quest to understand computation in the brain.  This project combined physics (physically modeling the impedance of the skull), engineering (he was on the committee of a PhD student who designed new skull contacts for EEG recording), statistics (literally years of subtle data analysis), the psychology of language (developing associationistic semantic models), and, of course, methodology (including an epic defense of the theoretical importance of invariants across EEG and perceptual data.[2]   By 2012, he’d embarked on an ambitious new project to collect EEG signals from couples in therapy, with an eye toward understanding the neuroscience of “insight.”

Suppes’ bibliography includes almost 500 articles and books, averaging 7 per year throughout the 2000s and 4 per year through the 2010s.  His last single-author, peer-reviewed paper appeared in 2014 in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology and proved the conceptual independence of our qualitative notions of probability, uncertainty, and probabilistic independence—demonstrating that no one can be defined in terms of the other two. [3] Whether this result turns out to be significant or not (opinions were divided when Suppes presented it informally to peers at Stanford), it shows Suppes’ commitment until the end to the methods he became known for: the characterization of basic concepts with qualitative axioms, and the proof of precise results about them.

RIP Gordon Tullock (1922- 2014)

"Who is that crazy old man?" I asked. Nodding at a short fellow slowly leaving the seminar room.

"He just gave you a huge compliment."

I was still a PhD student, and I had just given a paper on Adam Smith and Rousseau at the Summer Institute.* I had been nervous because my last few talks to economist-only crowds had been confrontational affairs. But this event seem to have gone fine – the interruptions were respectful, even fruitful, and surprisingly philosophical – that is, until the old guy had started to lecture me.

"Really?" I was pretty sure that I was being made fun of.

"No, really. He stayed for your Q&A, and he was convinced."

"But that rant about Rousseau's children, that was totally off the wall."

"Oh, no, you convinced him that Rousseau on property rights and rents anticipates the Virginia School."

"What do I care…" I paused, "Wait, who was that?"

"That was Gordon Tullock."

'"Tullock?" I almost ran after him.

Gordon Tullock died yesterday. I met him a few more times upon my (almost) annual returns to George Mason, but we never had a real conversation. Tullock had a knack of measuring you up, and he could be very biting (and funny). You got a sense that he did not suffer fools lightly. Tullock's name is attached to theories of rent-seeking and public choice economics more generally. I don't think I insult his memory if I say that his ideas were all fairly simple. (He was a trained lawyer.) His papers were not dressed up with complex mathematics; they would get to the point often with sparse, lean prose. At bottom, it was all about incentives and logical entailment. (I always love that his most famous work, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962), has such a philosophical title.) But he pursued his ideas with relentless focus and utter contempt for fashion and prestige. His work caused economists to stop focusing exclusively on market-failure and to start taking government failure, and institutional design more generally, equally seriously. I thought he deserved some share of the Nobel that Buchanan did win, in part, for their joint work. Buchanan understood his own work as part of a great, long conversation. Tullock also took  ideas seriously – he did attend my talk on the history of political economy, after all --, but he did not feel the need to package them.

Some other time I may write a bit about his editorial stewardship of the journal Public Choice. But because I am on the eve of the PSA (Philosophy of Science association) in Chicago, I close with this: Tullock's work matters to the philosophy of science. In the 1950s and 60s – the age of Popper, Kuhn, Polanyi, etc. --, he paid attention to the philosophers of science. In return in The Organization of Inquiry he created what I, only half-jokingly, call 'public choice philosophy of science;' the core idea is that in reflecting on science, you can't simply assume that scientists are pure truth-seekers. In particular, it is quite possible that economic interests will buy directly or, more subtly, indirectly some scientists to lobby or speak on their behalf. That is to say, the institutional context and social organization of science plays a role in the outcomes that science reports. 

How to theorize about science and/or society while taking one's responses to incentives into account is, in fact, the central theme for analytical egalitarianism. Tullock's work has been pioneering in this respect. During the last few years, I discovered that Mandeville anticipated some of Tullock's best insights. I regret not having shared it with him; I think he would have been quite pleased to ditch Rousseau for the sharp, unsparing, but ultimately humane wit of Mandeville.

Can an Atheist be Virtuous? (On Smith on Hume with echoes of Bayle and Spinoza)

Thus died out most excellent, and never to be forgotten friend [David Hume--ES]; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion."—Adam Smith on David Hume, "Letter to Strahan," 9 November 1776.

After portraying Hume's magnanimity and cheerfulness on his deathbed reading Lucian's Dialogues with the Dead, Smith ads the sentence above. It links Hume's life to worthy ("excellent"), posthumous fame ("never to be forgotten"). In doing so, Smith distinguishes sharply between Hume's "character" and Hume's "philosophical opinions." Apparently consensus is possible in judgments of character—this fits Smith's moral theory more generally --, while according to Smith (enduring) consensus it is not possible in judgments of philosophical doctrine.

The primary, enduring significance of Smith's claim is not so much his unwillingness to condemn Hume's philosophical doctrines – many of which were inimical to the natural religion and physico-theology of even the moderate religious establishment of their time, but rather that in Smith's presentation an irreligious (reading Lucian not the Bible), mitigated skeptic can lead a moral life; in Smith's hand, Hume's life, then, vindicates Bayle's scandalous idea (modeled on Spinoza's life) that unbelievers could be moral and, thus, form a political union. By contrast, Hume, too, thought that individuals were capable of virtue without religion, but one need not rely on this; one simply ought to design institutions in the right way: "It is…a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave:" He added that "at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact." (Of the Independency of Parliament).

Behind every eminent Philosophical Woman, Stands a Man?

Peter Geach, who has died aged 97, was a formidable logician and happened to be married to one of the 20th century’s leading English-language philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe.

In a way this meant he was overshadowed. He did, though, have a strong philosophical life of his own, and without the thousands of hours of discussion that Elizabeth Anscombe had with him, her philosophy would not have attained the eminence it did.--The Telegraph

The quoted passage above are the first lines of an unsigned obituary of Peter Geach. It makes a remarkable claim: that his presence was decisive in her achievements. It's possible to read it as a sociological point: Geach was needed for Anscombe's status in the profession. But the more likely intended reading is that talking to him made her a much better philosopher. It's offered without evidence. Even if Anscombe says something as much somewhere, the counterfactual is hard to evaluate.* In addition, the obituary also offers an unflattering comparison between Geach and Anscombe: "Unlike the dense, unsignposted [sic] prose of Anscombe, Geach’s style was a pleasure to read." It does not occur to the author that, perhaps, on the whole, Anscombe was struggling to make genuinely original points on unwieldy topics, while Geach was working with a lot more self-imposed constraints.

In a curious lack of symmetry, the obituary does not assign Anscombe any responsibility for Geach's eminence or achievements. I am not an expert on the thought of either, but if one claims that Geach is a "honorary founder of the philosophical school that called itself “analytical Thomism,”" why not mention Anscombe at all? So, it's quite possible, of course, that Geach improved her philosophy, but we can't rule out the possibility that either his ideas sometimes made hers worse or that his presence was a net-zero in her philosopher career (etc.) Perhaps, one day there will be careful dispassionate scholarship on the issue.