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All about class.
*important caveat that said TT job was secured via an internal hire where two other grads of the same school…
Excellent questions! Re question 6, I have actually already invented a new punctuation mark. I can’t type it here, as…
29. Should competitive examination questions obey Betteridge’s Law?
It’s likely that Notre Dame will return to a policy of requiring GREs next year (this year they’re officially optional…
Would love to see what a successful answer (in the view of the All Souls’ examiners) looks like.
That list of questions has a beauty to it, I swear.
Emeritus at Illinois State University, Professor Detusch was a leading contributor to philosophical logic and cognate areas during his long career. There is a memorial notice here, and do see the first comment by Nathan Salmon. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Detusch or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.
(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer to the obituary.)
I second what Nathan says in his comment on Harry’s obituary. Here is my own attempt:
Harry possessed a clarity of mind that demanded philosophical problems
be attacked with great logical precision. A former student of Richard
Montague, David Kaplan and, unofficially, Alonzo Church, Harry wrote
a Ph.D. thesis at UCLA on relevance logic that remains influential in the
literature on that subject. He did not remain cloistered while in graduate
school and enjoyed speeding around Los Angeles in fast cars – either
with Montague in his Bentley, or in his own Porsche 911, which he once
drove into a mountain on Mulholland Drive to avoid driving off the road
and plunging to an early death. Harry was a great wit and was welcomed
into the social world of Eve Babitz, through whom he once encountered
Jim Morrison. He had an abiding interest in literature —especially
Nabokov— and (unlike Nabokov) in music. On graduating from UCLA,
he received a job offer from Rockefeller University, who then rescinded
it when they shut the department. Subsequently, Harry taught at Indiana
University and Illinois State University. He had a rare combination of
philosophical and logical acumen, and an intense desire to get to the
bottom of things. As such, he was especially interested in paradoxes, the
phenomena that underlie them, and in stating these in the most basic
logical terms. This approach is clear from his work on diagonalization,
propositional and other semantic paradoxes, and his three co-authored
contributions to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Relative
Identity, Russell’s Paradox, and Alonzo Church. These entries
demonstrate his gift for communicating ideas to a broad philosophical
audience and for collaborating successfully with others (he also
collaborated successfully with C. Anthony Anderson). He was an
especially gifted philosophical logician and authored papers on identity,
vagueness, modal logic, natural kind terms, fictional discourse, and the
question of whether one can create fictional and other abstract entities.
He is survived by his son, the philosopher Max Deutsch.
Here is something else I wrote about Harry, which is of more interest to philosophical logicians:
I'm grateful to Nathan Salmon and Oliver Marshall for their comments about my dad's work, its significance, and its influence on them, personally. I've also been glad to hear plaudits for his work from many other of my dad's colleagues and admirers, including Ed Zalta, Chris Menzel, Thomas Ferguson, C.A. Anderson, David Anderson, and Kent Machina (I hope they won't mind me naming them here.) I held a memorial celebration for my dad in August in Illinois and was very pleased that a good bunch of philosophers attended. Several of his ISU colleagues came along (Chris Horvath, Alison Bailey, Todd Stewart), Oliver and Thomas were there (and Oliver delivered a most excellent eulogy), and a former ISU undergraduate student of my dad's, Hope Sample, who now teaches philosophy at Carleton College in MN. I think he got a good send-off from philosophers. Thanks very much to everyone named here, and to Brian Leiter for posting the notice.
I'm sure it goes without saying that my dad had an enormous impact on me as a philosopher. I'll miss talking shop with him.
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