John’s Guest Book
This site has been created for people to write reminiscences and notes about John Haugeland. It is maintained by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. To add something, just “Leave a Reply” to this post (scroll down the page for the comment box).
Filed in no category 22 Comments so far
John taught one of the first graduate seminars I took, on Artificial Intelligence. Each week we had to write a two-page paper, and he returned these the next week, typically covered in comments like “Who says?” or “how about Carnap, for starters?” Each paper was given a numerical grade but the scale on which these grades were assigned was kept a mystery, and John only told the class what the grade distribution was for each paper. Later I figured out that it was a fourteen point scale, with 14 = A+, 13 = A, 12 = A- etc.
I also served as John’s TA for a course on Minds and Machines (or something like that). It was a big class, and the students had to write several papers, but there was also a multiple-choice final examination. The exam had its fair share of joke answers which reflected John’s inimitable style of humor. I learned from that class that it was possible to design effective multiple-choice exams in philosophy, and I was grateful that I was not left to grade 90 essay exams at the end of the semester.
Later, when I was being interviewed for the position here, I stayed in John and Joan’s apartment in Regent’s Park — they had bought their house but were waiting for work to be completed inside it, I think. After we decided to move to Chicago, John and Joan were among the first to welcome us, having us over to dinner several times in the first months. I remember once stopping by their place one evening soon after we moved here to find John sitting on their outdoor deck discussing Heidegger with several graduate students. John was always ready to talk philosophy at the drop of a hat. He was also unfailingly kind and friendly when he would run into Angela or me on the street. We would often walk home together from faculty meetings and just talk. He will be sorely missed.
Three years ago, I joined the PhD program in the Philosophy department at the University of Chicago, so that I could study under John Haugeland.
At the time, I thought I wanted to “specialize in Heidegger”; and I thought I would move on to write my dissertation under “the author of ‘Truth and Finitude’, and ‘Letting Be'”–some of the very best papers I had ever encountered on the so-called ‘early Heidegger’.
In the meantime, however, many changes took place in my understanding of what I wanted to do in philosophy. My fascination with Herrn Rektor dwindled to nil; I decamped from the Black Forest, and migrated north, to Königsberg.
On the other hand, my admiration for Haugeland the philosopher only increased; I discovered in his magnum opus, “Truth and Rule-Following (TRF)” a philosophical masterpiece of the first rank, a wonderful example of creative thinking in the spirit of Wilfrid Sellars. Haugeland was ‘Heideggerian’ only to the extent that the latter’s multiple-layered analysis of normativity (most importantly, the experience of taking norms to be authoritative for oneself, and the conditions for the loosening of their bindingness) set his fertile imagination into motion; but this was an imagination nourished equally importantly by Kuhn, Sellars, Kant, and others.
Yes, he had inscribed ‘shepherd of Being’ under his name at his office door; but he had none of the esotericism and theological-reek of such ‘shepherd parlance’. Yes, he also had a poster in his office, of a lion, with the caption, “Dreyfus is here”–but I think that he had gone much, much farther than his teacher in his work on the normativity of ‘skillful coping’.
To me, at least, even his humor had a Sellarsian character. Those of us who are largely convinced by Sellars’s “functional classification” theory of meaning (and partake of its ‘naturalistic’ motivations), and admire his simile of “Texas Chess”, cannot fail to be amazed by Haugeland’s extremely creative extension of that metaphor, in his discussion of ‘automated’, ‘esoteric’, and ‘empirical’ chess, in TRF.
Haugeland’s students have the responsibility to promote his creative work, and to look for ways of going beyond it.
I think my only serious frustration concerning my experience at the U of C, will be that I arrived too late here–I wish I could discuss with Professor Haugeland, when he was at the height of his powers, Kant, Sellars, and Haugeland.
Sevgili hocam, topragin bol olsun!
Alptekin Sanli
I met John when I was a PhD student at The University of Chicago. (I had seen him in action before in public, I think, at a memorable APA session on Mind & World with Putnam and Taylor.) We did not hit off at first, and even had a blow up in a class on Kuhn. After the class he looked me up and while I expected him to chide me for my bad behavior he said he liked my passion for philosophy. This broke the ice, but I can’t say we become close very fast.
Then one day we drove up to Northwestern to hear Dan Dennett (one of my undergrad teachers) debate Chalmers. Dan was in fine form that day, and John and I both congratulated him and say hi. Dan decided it would be a grand idea if John and I would discuss his successor to Elbow Room manuscript (which became Freedom Evolving.) Dan knew I adored Elbow room, and he figured it would be good to hear what an informed critic like John would think of his new project.
Anyway, things turned out a bit differently. John and I met (often at the Bonjour bakery) to discuss a chapter a week. Now, I was still in my simplistic naturalistic frame of mind, so John sensibly decided that I would have to play critic–no doubt he got perverse pleasure in trying to defend Dan. It’s not a very long book, but John and I get ever more involved in our discussions. At the end of our reading group I was awoken from my dogmatic naturalistic slumbers; inspired by John, I decided the world needed more scientifically informed skepticism of science’s self-understanding (in the manner of “Pattern and Being”).
Years later, I needed a position; I had somewhat daringly turned down a tenure track position with a heavy teaching load. After initial euphoria at my own courage, I felt rather dumb and was preparing for a year of poverty and adjuncting. Much to my surprise I got a call from Wesleyan University, where Sanford Shieh offered me a visiting position. He told me that (unbeknown to me) John had raved about me to Joe Rouse, who became my first important intellectual mentor outside of graduate school. Of course, at first Joe only wanted to talk about John and his work.
My first encounter with John was hearing his voice booming over the telephone in the spring of 1997 saying, much to my surprise, that Pitt would like to have me in its graduate program. When I visited before making my decision to go there — he and Jim Conant, the point men in the recruitment press gang, talked me out of going to Chicago — he was in his long hair and band-across-the-forehead phase (though I didn’t know it was only a phase at the time). I didn’t get to know John well at Pitt, but I took a couple of classes with him on Heidegger and, fortunately, wrote a paper he liked quite a bit. When he decided Chicago was in fact the place to be, he supported me transferring there to work with him. I came to know him partly as a (fairly hands-off) dissertation advisor, but I also as a friend, in large part because the presence and openness of Joan made it easy to get beyond his reserve to find the warm and generous person and thinker those close to him are familiar with. The two of them hosted a handful of us grad students in a lively reading group on Being and Time fairly regularly for a year and a half or so. John had some definite and idiosyncratic views about the book, but at the same time he managed to read it with fresh eyes, as if it was his first time through. Despite the fact that he’d been thinking about Heidegger as long as most of us had been alive, he didn’t set himself up as the authority, there to teach us newbies, but as a genuine conversation partner. John is now gone, and I’m deeply saddened not to be able to continue talking with him (and to continue trying to talk him out of his more wildly imaginative readings of Heidegger), but the example he set as a reader, writer, and thinker will, I have no doubt, continue to shape all of my work.
My first “meeting” with John was during my undergrad years at a small liberal arts college when I read his work on artificial intelligence. At the time, his writing allowed me to grow as a thinker and writer. He was one of many reasons, I wanted to pursue graduate studies at Chicago.
When I arrived in Hyde Park to begin my MAPH year, John was one of the first professors from the philosophy department that I met, outside of Ian Mueller and Candice Vogler. We were sitting at the same table during MAPH’s orientation dinner, and as I began to tell him about my interest in artificial intelligence, including my development as a philosophy student during my undergraduate years, John interrupted me to tell me that his daughter was interested in applying to my undergrad, and did I have any advice for her. Forgetting about epistemology for the moment, John and I discussed social life on a campus with just over 1000 people, and the benefits of independent study. Later that week, John invited me to his office to discuss my plans for my masters studies, and my philosophical interests. I felt exponentially more comfortable finding an intellectual home in Chicago’s philosophy department because of these encounters with John during my first week (and Joan likewise helped me feel at home with MAPH during that same week).
John was a presence in my life long before I met him, going back to his first days at Pittsburgh. As an undergraduate, I was a friend of Bill House, whom I believe became John’s first Ph.D. student at Pitt (although perhaps not his first to finish). The philosophical culture at Oberlin had made the analytic/continental divide seem a quaint anachronism, yet it was also an academic reality that powerfully marked the difference between Bill studying at Pitt and me at Northwestern. Bill’s occasional communications told me, however, in tones reminiscent of Arendt’s recollection of “rumors of a hidden king,” that a young philosopher named John Haugeland was showing how one really could just do first-rate work without tolerating that nonsense.
The question of whether one could make a philosophical career without choosing sides was still seriously in question in the 70’s and early 80’s, with “no” the default answer. I was told in two interviews at the same APA in 1976 that I couldn’t really be a philosopher of science because I studied continental philosophy and took Heidegger seriously, and couldn’t really be a continental philosopher because I studied philosophy of science and took Carnap and Hempel seriously (guess which jobs I didn’t get!). So after first reading John’s powerful work on cognitivism and artificial intelligence, my discovery of “Heidegger on Being a Person” was a professional as well as philosophical revelation, and a vindication of the very possibility of becoming the philosopher I aspired to be.
I nevertheless never met John until 1991, when I asked what inadvertently came across as a hostile question early in the discussion of “Dasein’s Disclosedness.” I had been wanting to meet this man for almost 15 years, and when I finally had the chance, it seemed, I had blown it. But of course John’s response was characteristically subtle, insightful, and above all generous, and it was the beginning of (for me, at least) a very special relationship.
John and I have never been colleagues, and never had the opportunity for sustained conversation for more than a few days at a time. Yet our conversations, at the Santa Cruz unveiling of “Truth and Rule-Following,” at Asilomar, at the New Orleans APA on Having Thought, and occasional visits to Pittsburgh, Chicago or Middletown, have been extraordinarily intense and rewarding philosophically, while simultaneously warm, humane, and often hilariously funny. His ground-breaking work, and his philosophical presence have indelibly marked me philosophically. The perhaps 30 days we have been together over the past 20 years have been one of a very small number of treasured, transformative philosophical friendships. I am grateful to have known him, honored to have been his friend, and my life and work have been graced by his presence. We have all suffered an immeasurable loss!
My fondest memory of John comes from the summer of 2001. Somehow or other, a weekly summer movie night had been organized in Cobb Hall. I think it was because Gary Jaeger had access to their mini movie theater and projection equipment. John, Joan and sometimes their stepdaughters would come to watch the films such as “Jules et Jim” or “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort”. Afterwards, folks would usually congregate outside to smoke while John and Joan would entertain with their knowledge of film lore. It was exhilarating the way John could weave philosophy and his encyclopedic knowledge into those lively after-movie conversations. It was like that great line from Epicurus: “At one and the same time we must philosophize, laugh, and manage our household and other business, while never ceasing to proclaim the words of true philosophy.”
Despite the fact that I learned about John late in graduate school, he and his writings were of such clarity, breadth and importance that they are celebrated throughout both my dissertation and the book I have published from it, and his writing on ‘authentic responsibility’ infuses my life and work. I will never forget his depth of insight, wisdom and perspective, his lively wit, and his quiet caring. I had carried with me a copy of the book to share with him and to thank him at his retirement celebration; sadly, he never had a chance to see it, nor to read the heartfelt dedication to him that I had written inside. I will miss him greatly. Such a considerate and thoughtful human being, such a deep and compassionate thinker. My thoughts and heart go out to his wife Joan – though I have never met you, I thank you for the extraordinarily sensitive updates on his unfolding condition and for the love and care you clearly shared – and to the rest of his family and close colleagues. His passing leaves a hole, but one rich in memories, writings and gifts.
Back in September 2009, I found out about John’s illness and wrote him a note of thanks. I kept the note to myself, though, because a wise friend advised me that I shouldn’t give John such a “goodbye note” before he was ready to say goodbye. I never got a chance to give it to him, however, because I was going to wait until after the conference, when his retirement was imminent; and so I sent it to Joan a few days ago, and she asked me to share it here. So, here it is.
“September 11, 2009
Dear John,
A couple years ago (Spring 2007), I walked out of a very difficult meeting at the department, and happened upon you in the hallway. I was in a bad spot, and you stepped outside with me and had a kind smile for me and said some very comforting, caring words. They gave me courage. The memory of that moment, and of every time I saw you – always with a smile, sometimes even a hug! You have always been the friendliest face for me in the department. Thank you for that – not to mention thanks for my kitchen floor, which I put together with tools you trustingly lent me (having even shown me how to use them in your workshop).
I’ve never had the privilege of talking philosophy with you, but I thought I’d write and tell you what an important and wonderful presence you’ve been for me here.
Truly,
Dasha”
As I mentioned in my remarks at the beginning of the conference, I owed John a great deal long before I met him, since (unbeknownst to me at the time) he had served as a reviewer of a manuscript that I had sent to a press shortly after leaving grad school. The review was quite positive, but more important to me was the assurance of the press’s editor that the reviewer had read “everything” in the area of the manuscript — both published and unpublished — and really knew what he was talking about. The manuscript was never published. Despite John’s review, a second review was really very critical (along the lines of the sort of response Joe Rouse reports in his account of his job interviews!) and the press needed unanimity. I also didn’t feel like revising it, though eventually the ideas all saw the light of day. When later I happened to meet John for the first time, he exclaimed “oh, you’re the author of that ms. I was so furious when the press decided not to publish it!” That blew me away. To learn that it was John Haugeland who had read the ms — a person who was something of a mythical presence to me, as a young assistant professor; someone who, for me, represented the highest achievement, namely, to be equally at home in phenomenology and analytic philosophy — and to know that he actually found something to approve in it and expressed it to me so warmly: you cannot imagine what this meant to me as I struggled to find a way beyond the dogmas of the day. But the best was yet to come, since it was only then that I really was able to *read* John properly. Like Joe Rouse, my personal encounters with John and Joan were, though not frequent, of extraordinary importance to my sense that the profession of philosophy was not the kiss of death for thinking. But it is John’s writings that have been my constant companion since first meeting him. And thus, while I will miss him terribly, there will still be, each day, new things for me to thank him for.
When I arrived in Hyde Park to begin my year, John was one of the first professors from the philosophy department that I met. We share names and I had been wanting to meet this man for almost 15 years. When I finally had the chance, it seemed, I had blown it. But of course John’s response was characteristically subtle, insightful, and above all generous, and it was the beginning of (for me, at least) a very special relationship.
Despite the fact that he’d been thinking about Heidegger as long as most of us had been alive, he didn’t set himself up as the authority, there to teach us newbies, but as a genuine conversation partner. John is now gone, and I’m deeply saddened not to be able to continue talking with him.
I knew John in a different way from those detailed above; you see he married my sister. I sincerely believe that John was the best thing that every happened for Joan. He saw exactly who and what she was helped her to achieve what she wanted. He never tried to encapsulate her or bend her to her will. In a way, he liberated her.
Although our family has had strained relationships, John gave Joan the strength and confidence to visit with Dad. When I called, John always had a minute to talk to me and opened the door for Joan and I to develop a close relationship after 40 years of virtual estrangement.
Despite his renown, his knowledge and education and his prodigious brain, John was a loving, caring, down to earth person and he’ll be missed by all who knew him.
On Saturday, October 2nd, I will be participating in the Memory Walk in San Antonio in Memory of John Haugeland.
Oh, John. Oh, Joan. Oh dear. I just got word of John’s death. What a terrible loss. My thoughts are with those of you who were closest to him. I am so glad to have known John, if only briefly. He leaves a big absence!
I had a brief interview with John when I was a prospective for the PhD course, and after a nice chat about Gilbert Ryle — a philosopher of whom John seemed to approve (‘ah, now Ryle is someone who deserves to be taken very seriously’) and also appeared to know everything — we got to talking about bookshops, and the general difficulty of getting decent books on academic philosophy in public libraries.
At that point, I didn’t know Chicago very well and was unaware of the majesty of the seminary Co-Op, so I remarked that I had been doing most of my book browsing and book-buying online in recent months, was finding it rather convenient and viewed if as the way of the future with regards to getting hold of hard-to-find publications.
John kindly explained the concept of the seminary Co-Op to me, where it is, how it works – and extolled the virtues of the place in understandably favourable and glowing terms. And then, standing up as if he’d sized me up and was inviting me to leave — and I must say, with terrifying rhetorical and alliterative grander — he unleashed the killer line:
“so here in Hyde Park, we browse in the browser but we buy from the bookstore”
Yes, he had inscribed ‘shepherd of Being’ under his name at his office door; but he had none of the esotericism and theological-reek of such ‘shepherd parlance’. Yes, he also had a poster in his office, of a lion, with the caption, “Dreyfus is here”–but I think that he had gone much, much farther than his teacher in his work on the normativity of ‘skillful coping’.
I realize that these comments are belated. That is un-avoidable. John Haugeland had passed before I made the connection. That is regrettable since his book “A-I The very idea” sat unread on my shelf for many years.
Having finally read it, his book made a profound impression on me. The subject “Artificial Intelligence” is intriguing in its own right, but more than that, I was impressed with the number of his key points that parallel my own independent work. I was really taken by the fact that we each were writing about two quite different subjects, and yet there were many striking parallels.
I am in the final stages writing a book about planning and managing projects and have for a number of years used the terms Syntax, Mappings and Semantics. These terms, do actually describe what is going on when a logical approach is used in developing the project plan. In light of Haugelands comments, a slight shift to the right and everything fits perfectly.
So this is a posthumous message.
Thank you John
It is a very long time ago, but JCH and I were engaged to be married in about 1974, having both been graduate students in philosophy at UC Berkeley. I backed out of the engagement. We were in touch extremely intermittently thereafter, but I remember him very warmly, and still have correspondence of his in the eaves of my cottage.
Reduce videos into one or much more clips and get rid of undesired components such as trailer or advertisements.Cost-free download application features.Reduce a video into segments with millisecond precision. Specify which components to incorporate or exclude.
Dear Dr. Kenny, My daughter was diagnosed with ADHD the summer after her freshman year of high school. I think my doctor is understanding your dosage examples due to the fact that my child showed improvement with concerta but needed to have the dosage increased over the years. She is now a senior and has been on 72mg of Concerta…2 36mg pills each morning for the past year. My daughter had the best academic year of her life this past year! Although that is wonderful news…she is now developed some problems with anxiety! My daughter has always had some anxiety from the time of being a young child…fear of dogs and storms. Now at 17, for about the last 4 to 6 months, she is crying at school over dark storm clouds and asking to sleep with me during small rain showers over fear of tornadoes! We live in Maryland not tornado alley!! I took her to the doctor…I was sure it was due to the Concerta…he disagrees saying that she has always had some anxiety and thinks we should just add Paxil, as an anxiety treatment. It took me a long time to convince my husband to let our daughter take ADHD medication but he has seen the benefits. We are both concerned about just adding another medication before first try lowering her Concerta to make sure it isn’t causing the increased anxiety. I am also concerned about how that will show on her academic progress? She said she thought she heard gunshots outside the other day and seems to be very in tune to every little noise she hears outside! It seems to be evolving into more than just anxiety over storms and dogs!! If concerta was going to have this effect on her…would it have shown up immediately since she has been on it for about 3 years and at the 72 mg this past year…or could it build up in her and now be causing her increased problems over the last several months? Please give me your professional opinion, I am unsure what to do?Thank you, S
curly weave hair http://mediumlacewigs.iwopop.com/ curly weave hair
Cost-free Video Cutter is a tiny system does precisely what is says, with no frills or extras. It might import and export MPEG4, DivX, WMV, MOV, FLV or MP3 formats (such as conversions), with minimal fuss.