On Sun, 07 Apr 2002 18:31:25 +0000 "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> writes:
>
> Poor woman. What a sucker. He was wretch. So was Russell, btw, but
> far more
> charming and entertaining. Quine was also a jerk, a real hollow man,
> ever
> try to read his autobiography?
I never met Quine, although people I know who did seemed to have liked him. His politics were abominable though.
> A real behaviorist nightmare. I went
> there
> and I wrote this. No inner life at all. Skinner's autobiography, by
> contrast, is fascinating, there was in interesting guy, rather odd,
> tried to
> raise his daughter in a Skinner box.
Actually, he constructed what was basically a climate-controlled crib for his young daughter. It was not the same as the Skinner boxes that he used in his research. He did attempt to market his climate-controlled cribs commercially, an enterprise that was an ignomious failure. Nevertheless, now a days, similar kinds of cribs are widely used in hospitals for infants.
In the third volume of his autobiographical trilogy - *A Matter of Consequences*, Skinner mentions how in the 1950s he became increasingly sympathetic to the CPUSA as many of his friends were blacklisted, although the only person he mentions by name is the actor and comic Zero Mostel (elsewhere Skinner describes how he used his studies of variable ration reinforcement schedules to help improve Mostel's standup routine).
>James and Dewey were wonderful
> people,
> by contrast, and by all accounts so is John Rawls.
I did hear Rawls speak at Boston Universitty to a philosophy class about 15 years ago (as I understand he almost never does public lectures). As I recall he spoke with a very pronounced stutter, although once he got himself going, he came across quite impressively.
Jim F.
>
> jks
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
> http://www.hotmail.com
>
________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.