Uncle Chuck: 1922 - 2005

[patoadam]

My uncle/cousin, Charles Sherover, passed away Sunday, October 23, at the age of 83. Although he was my first cousin once removed, I knew him as "Uncle Chuck".

During World War II, Charles worked in military intelligence, decoding Japanese messages.

Charles later became a distinguished philosopher, teaching at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He wrote extensively on the subjects of time and democracy. He gave Václav Havel advice on how to foster democracy in the Czech Republic. His favorite philosopher was Kant, whose "Critique of Pure Reason" he translated into English. He also translated Rousseau's "Social Contract". I presume he felt that previous translations were inadequate.

Although his health was clearly declining, his death was sudden. When we find out the cause of death, probably a heart attack or stroke, I will add a comment here.

Charles was an intellectual whose life revolved around books rather than people, but he also lived for his cats. He said that he had recovered from a previous life-threatening illness only because he felt that his cats needed him.

Uncle Chuck was very good to me when I was growing up. I enjoyed his visits, and I enjoyed visiting him in New York. Over the years, we had many lively discussions of philosophy, history, and politics.

When I get the official obituary I will post it here.

Comments

From the New York Times, part 2

[patoadam]

Attempt to Restore Legitimacy

The pluralists' meeting in Cambridge last month marked a new step in a quarrel that has been marinating for nearly a decade, ever since they founded their first organization, known as the Committee for Pluralism in Philosophy in the late 1970's. Their purpose, as they explain it, was not to create a new orthodoxy, but merely to restore legitimacy to the several schools of thought obscured by what they regarded as the analysts' domination of the major academic departments.

But, the argument pitting the pluralists against the analysts goes back much further, at least until early this century when philosophy took a major turning, originally in Vienna. That is where the school of logical positivism, the ancestor of the Anglo-American analytical school took form. The new line of thought, originated and developed by the likes of Rudolph Carnap, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and centered eventually in England, put a stress on logic and the methods of science, dismissing earlier philosophy as portentious verbiage.

Metaphysics Is Attacked

This group held that the age-old metaphysical questions were meaningless, since an analysis of the language used to frame them showed them to be nonsensical. Earlier philosophers' statements about ethics and morality, for example, were only expressions of the philosophers' emotions or opinions; they had no grounding in logic or empirical fact. In other words, metaphysics, which had been the philosophical motor for two millenia, was meaningless.

"What the analysts said really was that the classical questions of philosophy were really questions about language," Arthur Danto, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, said. "The idea was that there was a frontier that you could drive back by an ever more refined linguistic analysis."

A recent issue of Harvard Magazine gave an example of this sort of thing drawn from Willard Van Orman Quine, considered by many to be the current titan of American philosophy. The question was one of the big ones in metaphysics - the definition of being. Professor Quine's Anglo-American analytical answer: "To be is to be the value of a bound variable" - a difficult concept to explain briefly.

Disdained as Airy and Fuzzy

Professor Smith, Professor Sherover, and others dismiss this sort of thing as a bright but empty game played by the dreaded SMAG, the Singleminded Analytical Group, and they promote a return to the more freewheeling, literary traditions of Europe, where Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre provided a more soulful alternative to the analysts' brainy but dry logic. Many of the anti-analysts refer to themselves as Continentals. They in turn are disdained by some of the analysts as fuzzy, airy, ignorant of the empirical data, and more attached to feeling than to thought.

But here it becomes complicated, in particular because some philosophers dismiss the idea that there is a genuine intellectual quarrel taking place, or even that pluralists' definition of the issue is accurate. At Yale, for example, Ruth Barcan Marcus, cited by many of the pluralists as a major champion of the analytic school, denies that hardcore analysts exist these days, or that the philosophical establishment has ceased asking the big questions.

"It's not just fake history, it isn't even history," she said, speaking of the pluralists' version of philosophy's changes. "The tradition up to Kant was analytical. It was one of addressing questions in a careful way and giving reasons for one's point of view."

"There was also a close connection between philosophy and science," she said, dismissing a common pluralists' charge that the analysts, whether they exist as a category or not, pretentiously mimic the sciences. "Plato's Academy bore the inscription: 'Those who have not studied mathematics shall not enter here.' Leibnitz invented the calculus. Spinoza wrote up his Ethics like geometry. Nobody is more analytical than Descartes. They had tremendously high standards of clarity and a healthy regard for good reasons."