Word: aging
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us take our earlier examination question, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the age he lived in?" The equivocator would answer it this way: "Some people believe that David Hume was not necessarily a great philosopher, because his thoughts was merely a reflection of conditions around him colored by his own personality. Others, however, strongly support Hume's greatness on the grounds that his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before...
...check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take a typical example: "Hume brought empiricism to its logical conclusion: "The question is asked. "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age he lived in?" Our hero replies by opening his essay with, "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If this be the spirit of the age he lived in, then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea what Hume really said, or what...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or fencing with him, but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we first note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...
Before I knew it. I was on strike myself, having been taught at an early age never to cross a picket line and the lesson having stuck. I wondered for a spell whether a New York City teacher ought to adhere to this rule, but then sat back and proceeded to enjoy the prospect of not attending classes-in contrast to Harvard-per-usual, where I failed to attend them but got depressed about it. As the next logical step. I began to absorb the issues of the strike-ROTC. Afro-American Studies, expansion-and could see nothing objectionable...
...crummy the New York school system was. I am from Boston, so I quickly told Jed how crummy the Boston school system is. And from that we got into a discussion about how crummy education in general is. I mentioned Jonathon Kozol (whose Death at an Early Age was just appearing in the Atlantic ) and Jed mentioned Peter Schragg and both of us felt vaguely impressed with the other, although, most of all, we were each gratified with ourselves. (Since all this time the shower was still struggling to warm itself, I guess Nathan would quite rightly have considered ours...