in '68, when i was on the staff of the NYCLU (my first job), i represented Sidney on a discon in a demo arrest. a couple of years later - on his doing - i entered the doctoral program in his department (but quickly regressed to lawyering under the pressure of the times).
i was in his causation seminar (Sidney on theories for discovering unconscious motivation of action - "the lapsus linguae theory of Dr. Fraud"), and for over thirty years we have been in a university seminar together ("Political Economy of War and Peace").
the NYTimes obit omits his (soft) left politics. he described himself as a "Menshivik". he was a close friend of Ed Saïd, and though he always tred carefully on the zionist question never disguised his hatred of the likudniks, Sharon et. al.
another Sidney line: on whether ontology encompassed epistemology
- "no matter, never mind"
adieu, Sidney
"yeah, yeah"
john mage ---- Sidney Morgenbesser, 82, Kibitzing Philosopher, Dies By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 4, 2004
Sidney Morgenbesser, whose servings of logic, wit and insight as a Columbia University philosopher for a half-century prompted comparisons to Socrates - minus the Yiddish accent - died on Sunday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. He was 82.
The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, said Leonie Haimson, the daughter of his companion, Joann Haimson.
Near the end, Dr. Morgenbesser entertained a stream of bedside visitors with pronouncements about politics, God and baseball.
Kibitzing, a gift he developed on the Lower East Side, where his father was a garment worker, was the medium through which Dr. Morgenbesser reached the highest of intellectual planes. Colleagues and former students described a teacher whose power and influence were felt not so much in a legacy of articles and books (there were relatively few for a tenured professor of his standing) as through the deceptively whimsical give-and-take that allowed him to distill the essence of things, taking kibitzing to the edge of such frontiers as metaphysics and epistemology. With freewheeling intellectual banter that many likened to Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of students, including the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once wrote that he "majored in Sidney Morgenbesser."
Dr. Morgenbesser first studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and was ordained as a rabbi, before becoming something of a Columbia legend at the time of the student uprising in 1968 for being beaten when he joined a human chain against the police.
"You ought to very carefully observe what transpires," he said to fellow professors during a riot. "Watch carefully."
Few watched more things more carefully than Dr. Morgenbesser, the John Dewey professor of philosophy, particularly when it came to essential meanings. He was once asked if it was unfair that the police hit him on the head during the riot.
"It was unfair but not unjust," he pronounced.
Why?
"It's unfair to be hit over the head, but it was not unjust since they hit everybody else over the head."
Dr. Morgenbesser's reputation for questioning other scholars, often in midsentence with barbed humor, struck fear in the hearts of would-be sages.
It went like this, according to Arthur Danto, a Columbia philosopher: "Let me see if I understand you," Dr. Morgenbesser would begin.
"He would restate the thesis, and that would be that," Dr. Danto said. "It was one of the ordeals you had to go through."
In an interview yesterday, Noam Chomsky, the linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agreed with Dr. Morgenbesser about some things and not others, called him "one of the most knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern period."
Dr. Chomsky called him "a philosopher in the old sense - not so much what's on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion."
Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, struggled to define Dr. Morgenbesser's contribution, finally resorting to metaphor.
"You don't ask what the wind does," he said. "It's just power and self-sustaining energy."
But it was often energy with a humorous punch line, as Dr. Morgenbesser earned fame for witticisms. He insisted the jokes were openings to more substantive philosophic discussions.
An example: in the 1950's, the British philosopher J. L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the close analysis of language. He pointed out that although two negatives make a positive, nowhere is it the case that two positives make a negative. "Yeah, yeah," Dr. Morgenbesser said.
Another: in the 1970's, a student of Maoist inclination asked him if he disagreed with Chairman Mao's saying that a proposition can be true or false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, "I do and I don't."
Sidney Morgenbesser was born in Manhattan on Sept. 22, 1921. In addition to his seminary degree, he earned another bachelor's degree from the City College of New York. He completed his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and, after teaching at Swarthmore College and the New School of Social Research, joined Columbia's faculty in 1954. In 1968, he was a member of a faculty panel that drafted proposals to reform the university after the student unrest.
He was a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Philosophy for most of his career. He wrote more than 50 articles, many with colleagues, and edited six anthologies.
Dr. Morgenbesser, whose only immediate survivor is Ms. Haimson, never lost his Talmud-inspired gifts for reasoning. A few weeks before his death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God.
"Why is God making me suffer so much?" he asked. "Just because I don't believe in him?"