``a real non-hierarchial professor'' CB
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Yes. He was certainly that. The reading list was ten pages long and covered every major work in philosophy. The standing assignment was to read one and prepare a report or an oral presentation for the final.
Anyway, thinking about F, I can see why he was so casual. He really was a philosopher so he didn't need to prove himself in academia. It didn' t matter to him. In his lectures, he was not really talking about philosphy he was doing philosophy. Again it didn't matter whether we got it or not. It was up to us to understand and then figure out what we thought about what he was saying.
Also his writing was very much like his voice, so I assume he might have taped his thoughts and then written them doww---at least in the later less technical works.
I took a brief look at his Problems in Empiricism and saw his early discussion of quantum theory with its math, so he was comfortable in advanced work and probably didn't feel like he needed to prove himself there either....
(this is from a telnet account to escape job related monitoring.. sorry for the typos)
CG