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A Sonnet in Remembrance of Barry Stroud
Inside the span subtending endless night,
a man uncloses wide the newborn eye,
beholds his own becoming, purled and bright,
as one submerged who, rising, sees a sky. Engendered in that blind, umbilic deep,
whence, lightward, life’s inborn persistings bloom, the call to know our state in custom’s keep
did in his conscience like polaris loom;
and by its guiding glow in time he gleaned
there was no here or there, no sea or air,
or billowed blue damascus steel between:
there are but fables and their thoroughfares.
How rare—where gone?—this man thus shined upon, for him to be for me the one that shone.
Remembering Barry
Recently, I was having coffee with a former colleague, a well-respected senior philosopher. About halfway through our conversation, he began to spontaneously praise Berkeley Philosophy, saying that he always had the best philosophical conversations with people from Berkeley. ‘Berkeley philosophers discuss real philosophy. They don’t get distracted by what is happening in “the literature”, or by what is fashionable.’ He then asked me why this was the case, adding ‘is it just because of Barry Stroud?’ I paused for a moment to think about this question, as any good Stroud student would, and I responded, ‘well it is probably not just because of Barry; but, yes, it is mainly because of Barry.’
One of the things I remember most clearly from my years as a PhD student was the way that Barry would constantly probe us graduate students with questions after Departmental colloquia. Many of us would attend these events fairly regularly, in part to hear some famous philosopher speak, but also in part to indulge in wine and cheese. I remember walking into my very first post-colloquium reception thinking that the occasion seemed to be pleasant and relaxed. It was exactly at that point that Barry walked directly up to me and, almost inches from my face, said ‘what did you think of what that person said?’ I was absolutely stunned. I had no idea what the speaker had just said. And I was even more shocked that Barry was asking me. I think I eventually managed to mutter out a few things about some sort of philosophical doctrine like ‘ethical realism’ or something similar. Barry quietly listened to what I said, and then advised me that, ‘it is a surprisingly difficult thing to do, but you must learn to listen to what people say.’ That was my first lesson with Barry.
What I just described was in no way an isolated incident. Barry regularly attended departmental colloquia, guest lectures, and various other events. Afterward, he would casually stroll around 301 Moses sipping white wine and querying graduate students with some version of ‘what did you think of what that person said?’ I recall that nearly all of us were terrified of this question. Did it have a right answer? A wrong answer? Was this some sort of informal test or assessment of our ability? And, if so, what was Barry looking for? What I know now, but didn’t then, was that Barry wasn’t quizzing us and he wasn’t looking for any type of answer. He genuinely wanted to know the answer to the exact question he raised. He wanted to know what we thought. Asking us this, over and over, was one of the ways in which Barry cared for us, and for our training as philosophers.
Barry took us graduate students seriously. And once we began to actually share our thoughts with him, he was generous enough to engage with the substance of our ideas and carefully consider them in their own terms. If we had a bad idea, he said so. If we misunderstood something that a somebody said or wrote, he would let us know. And if we tried to appeal to some fashionable doctrine in contemporary philosophy, he would shut it down. After all, Barry was after what we thought.
By treating us like serious philosophers, after colloquia, during seminars and supervisions, and in the hallways of Moses Hall, Barry gave us all the feeling that we were mutually engaged in the activity of doing philosophy, and that this was a profoundly valuable and deeply important project.
Barry supervised my PhD thesis but I honestly cannot remember ever discussing the details of my thesis with him. Despite that, there is no question that I learned how to be a philosopher from him. Taking philosophy seriously meant, among other things, that I had to listen carefully to what people are trying to express, guard against the various distractions of professionalisation, think things through very carefully, and, above all, try my best to understand the philosophical questions that demanded my attention. I also learned that philosophy, at least when done properly, is very difficult, and requires a significant investment of one’s time. But, at the very same time, Barry also showed me that philosophical reflection can be immensely enjoyable, one of the true lasting pleasures of human life.
Barry’s constant presence in Moses Hall allowed all of us graduate students to see how to do philosophy with seriousness, but also how to delight in philosophical inquiry. Like my former colleague, many of the very best philosophers that I know have come from Berkeley. But, unlike him, I don’t find this surprising. These are all people who, even if never formally supervised, were shepherded into philosophy by Barry.
In the early 1970's, I took six philosophy classes at U.C. Berkeley, and two of these were taught by Prof. Stroud. One of these classes was on Wittgenstein and the other was on Hume. Prof. Stroud's influence on me is shown by two of my articles on patent law (JPTOS 99:192-249 (2017); JPTOS 92:26-70 (2010)). The first of these applies Wittgenstein's family-of-resemblances analysis to the obviousness inquiry (35 U.S.C. 103), and here I quoted from Prof. Stroud's essay in the book, "Mind, Meaning, and Practice." The second applies Wittgenstein's account of what is "expectation" to the obviousness inquiry (35 U.S.C. 103), where I reproduced an answer that Prof. Stroud sent me in an email dated Nov. 8, 2009. The answer read, in part, "Whether someone was expecting something can . . . be shown more by his reactions after the thing happens, than by anything that was going on at the time he is said to be expecting." Next year, I'll be publishing an article on patent law, where I cite Chomsky and Frege, on the topic of how context provides meaning to a word in a sentence (this further reveals the continuing influence of those six courses, that I took way back when). Now, regarding personality, I was surprised that in answer to my emailed question, Prof. Stroud addressed me as, "Dear Dr. Brody" instead of by something like, "Dear Former Student." Also, when Prof. Stroud had office hours in the early 1970's, I was surprised (and delighted) by the fact that Prof. Stroud listened intently and carefully to my questions, and by the fact that his answers were more than simply a direct answer to my question - - - his answers identified additional avenues that I could consider exploring for my term paper.
Tom Brody (A.B. from U.C. in 1973, Ph.D. from U.C. in 1980).
Barry’s Office
Here’s a typical interaction you would have in Barry’s office:
You’re in there, you’re fumbling around for what to say to some question Barry’s just asked you about the sad piece of writing you’d asked him to read. You mumble some things here and there, and at some point Barry interjects:
Well, hold on. Let me ask you this. How did you get here today?
Um. . . I drove?
Ah, ok. And where did you park?
I parked on Bancroft, near College.
I see. . . . So where is your car?
Ok, right. . . yeah, this is actually something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about, it’s related to things I’ve been thinking about in my dissertation. On one hand, part of me wants to say that the car--
Well, hold on.
Oh, ok.
It’s on Bancroft, right? Your car’s on Bancroft. That’s where it is.
Yes. Of course! It’s on Bancroft. Barry, you just put that so clearly.
Once, fairly late in graduate school, I was asked who my favorite philosopher was. It’s funny that the question had never occurred to me before. But after some brief reflection, I answered: Barry Stroud. In the course of this brief reflection, Barry beat out David Hume, the only other contender. And it is true that Barry was my favorite philosopher: He was interesting, subtle, tough, direct and unyielding, yet generous and patient, and he was thoughtful without a trace of indulgence. His work was deep and clear, but not too clear (which, I think, is a condition for real depth). —To illustrate this: Another question that stumped me some years later, because, funnily enough, it had never occurred to me before, is: What is the significance of philosophical skepticism? I confess that I have never managed to answer that one.
Barry marked my six years in Berkeley not only through his teaching and through our conversations (many of them in Café Nefeli where, I knew, I could usually find Barry at lunchtime), but perhaps most importantly by engaging my imagination. He was present with me every day, as both an imagined and real philosophical interlocutor and also as a role model—as someone who knew how to live well, but, again, without indulgence. He appreciated the joys of life without mystifying them. He liked good wine, good food, and company—even mine, which was probably not always good. And he had his own style, not only as an intellectual and philosopher, but as an ordinary person. (His turquoise or burgundy socks which matched his polo shirts come to mind!)
It pains me deeply that I have not spoken to Barry in recent years. This is partly because of the exigencies of life, but partly also because I felt that I never could find the right words to say what I wanted to say, so that what mattered to me the most always remained unspoken. I felt that I never managed to convey to Barry all my affection for him. What I really wanted to say to him approaches this: Dear Barry, I will always be deeply grateful for your longstanding support, for everything I have learned from you, and for having you as my role model. I have great admiration for you as a philosopher and an intellectual and a person: I especially value your directness and patience, your depth and clarity in thought, and your integrity. I also just really like you. I miss you dearly.
I didn’t have as much ongoing contact with Barry as most of you did. But we encountered each other repeatedly over the years, thanks usually to the good graces of Rogers Albritton, whom I miss just as intensely and who embodied for me many of the same virtues: modesty, clarity, patience, wit, and the ability to listen with a generous ear. I’ve spent much of my time working at the fringes of philosophy while these two and a few others like them have tended the center. Wallace Stevens is one of the poets who leave you with the feeling that reading poetry is a way of being civilized. Barry was one of the few philosophers who could leave you with the same feeling about doing philosophy. I’m permanently grateful for our times together.
Even though Barry was not my dissertation advisor or someone I worked very closely with, he was a tremendously warm and supportive presence for me throughout my time in graduate school at Berkeley.
When I began graduate school, I felt completely like a fish out of water; I had a bad case of imposter syndrome and felt that I did not know anything compared to my peers. That year Barry co-taught the first-year seminar with Hannah Ginsborg. I was too insecure to speak much during the seminar itself, but we wrote regular reading responses, which Hannah and Barry took turns reading and commenting on. So, Barry got to know me initially through those written responses, the occasional conversation, and also in his role as the Graduate Advisor that year. I also felt a connection to Barry as a fellow Torontonian. I still recall him describing to me how as a kid he used to swim and play in the Don River. (This amazed me because the Don River that Barry described was something of old storybooks for me, since it was largely destroyed in the construction of the Don Valley Parkway in the 1950s.)
After that first year, on many different occasions, Barry went out of his way to encourage me, and to directly address my lack of confidence. He told me in several different, but all very direct, ways that my work was good and that I should quit being so insecure. I also have some vivid memories, from later in graduate school, of Barry congratulating me about some work I had done or a talk I had given. He went out of his way to seek me out, tell me how pleased he was, and he did it in such a warm tone which made clear that he really did care.
There was something very unique and distinctly helpful about these interactions with Barry. He didn’t just address my work, but also me as a person. He made clear that he noticed and cared about how I was doing. And it felt as though he was keeping an eye out and cheering me on. In addition to my immense admiration for him as a philosopher, I feel deeply indebted to Barry for his kindness.
I was not strictly speaking a student of Barry's. He was not on my committee, I never taught for him, and I only took a couple of classes with him. But he affected who I am as a philosopher at a profound level, as much as anyone else during my time at Berkeley.
Above all, Barry exemplified and taught the value of patience. I think he would say that he attempted to teach us the value of going slow: of ruminating on the possible meanings of a perplexing passage, of becoming puzzled about an obvious assumption, of teasing out the concrete implications of an abstract claim. Most people who have met me would observe that I rarely manage to actually go slow: it's just too far from my native temperament. (As Barry put it with characteristic succinctness after a talk I gave in Moses last spring, 'You tried to do too much.') I'm fine with that, for myself. But I do think I've managed to acquire some patience -- some ability to become puzzled and curious about what seems obvious, and to spend time with that puzzlement. Every day, his gently, persistently probing voice inhabits my head, asking –- actually, really asking -- what I mean by what I'm saying. And for that, I am deeply grateful.
Beyond that sliver of philosophical wisdom, l am also grateful that I managed to pick up a bit of Barry's love for food, wine, and Italy. At dinners after colloquia, he counseled patience from his tablemates (and the waitstaff), insisting on the importance of slowing down and tasting -- really tasting -- the risotto. When my husband Dmitri and I were first in Venice on our honeymoon 17 years ago, we clutched an increasingly creased and smudged printout of his emailed advice about tiny restaurants serving strange shellfish. Again in Rome with our kids 5 years ago, we wandered back alleys to track down his fried artichokes. Each of the places we went shared a common characteristic: simple, elegant, quiet, and focused on the joy of attending to food itself.
At this moment, at least for me, in my absurdly frenetic world -- so many administrative emails! contributions to volumes! kids' lunches! constitutional crises! -- Barry's insistence on taking the time to savor ideas, tastes, images, and friends is especially difficult to acknowledge, but also for that reason especially valuable. And while he sometimes enjoyed playing the curmudgeon, I'm confident he did know how deeply he had influenced so many of us to move through the world with at least a bit more patience: with that blend of skeptically incisive and wryly appreciative attention to details, as they reside within their real, robust contexts. I'll do my best to carry on that habit, thinking of him as I go.
I will be coming to the memorial along with Aryeh Kosman. We were all graduate students together at Harvard, along with my late wife, Sara Ruddick. Sally and I kept in touch with Barry over the years, and I more frequently since my son now lives in Berkeley. I spent a splendid afternoon with him and his daughters a month or so before he died, talking about graduate school days and his attractions to philosophical analysis ("a way of discovering how things work"). He was, in the fullest, most laudatory sense, the most "companionable" philosopher I have known.
Barry and I met in graduate school in a course in which he was enrolled and I was the teaching assistant. Our first philosophical bond was memorably a mutual disregard for the teacher. But happily we soon found other topics of mutual interest, as we did whenever we met over the years in Canada, New York, Oxford, and Berkeley, including our last afternoon a few weeks before he died. I came to regard Barry as a paragon of the three "philosophical" virtues: Clarity, Depth, and Charity. By "Charity", I mean attentive, patient, generous companionability which makes philosophical discussion a boon. Whether "Charity" is "the greatest" of these three, it is the one I will miss most with his loss, along with his endearing wry smile and chuckle.
I came to Berkeley in August to see Barry and to say farewell. I believe it was a very moving occasion for both of us and I have communicated personal thoughts to his daughters. I was very glad that Barry got to see the essay I published about Stanley Cavell in the Los Angeles Review of Books in April. In it I expressed my opinion about Cavell’s remarks about Barry at an APA meeting in response to Barry’s invited remarks about Cavell’s views. Barry was deeply hurt by Cavell’s remarks and as Cavell memorialized the event in his memoirs I wanted to get my reaction in print mainly for Barry’s sake. I think I’ll leave that brief intervention as my memorial act. Needless to say I had a very great admiration for Barry as a philosopher. I treasured him as a friend and a deep and wide-ranging thinker.
I had heard of Barry's illness about two weeks before he died, from Stanley Chen. Stan told me that Barry was still reading emails, and I began composing one to him, but then I didn't hit the "send" button in time. His death came more quickly than I expected.
What I wanted to tell him was that the many classes I took with him, especially the first-year seminar he co-taught with Hannah in the fall of 2005, left a lasting philosophical impression on me. It's hard to say what exactly it was that so impressed me about him, but it had to do with his unique approach to philosophy and the task of philosophizing, somehow at once quietist and yet deeply invested in philosophical questions and the perplexity they give rise to. In that first year seminar, he kept us on our toes, and made me realize how easy it is to unwittingly slip into confusions when doing philosophy. The questions he asked could be disorienting, like having the rug pulled out from under one's feet, but in a good way. He was one of only a handful of teachers I've had in my life whose classes I will never forget.
Barry was also a fun and engaging person to hang out with, something philosophers aren't generally known for. Lindsay Crawford hosted a going-away party when she and I both left Berkeley in 2015. It was mostly graduate students, but Barry came, drank wine, and talked with everyone there for some time. I told him about my upcoming road trip to my new job in upstate New York, with a cat in the car, and he dispensed tips and reminiscences from his own experience driving across the country with a cat. That was the last conversation I had with him, unfortunately, but it's a very good memory.
I knew Barry not so much as a philosopher -- though I did audit his provocative course on skepticism --but as a friend and fellow traveler. My husband Donald Davidson and I, Thomas Nagel and his wife Anne Hollander, traveled with Barry and often his friend Gabriella, to Egypt, Patagonia, and along the coast of Turkey. These trips were strictly for pleasure. Then in our professional roles we were together at conferences in Mexico, Spain, and San Merino. Barry was a wonderful traveling companion, curious, delighted, ingenious in times of difficulty. I talked to him on the phone about a week before he died, reminding him of our travels together. I did not expect him to speak, but he was actually able to respond coherently. Barry was a wonderful traveling companion, curious, delighted, ingenious in times of difficulty. As a friend and neighbor, he was not only interesting and kind, but also a terrific cook. I will remember him as one of my dearest friends with whom I wish I were still exploring the world.
I have one story about Barry I’d wanted to share: The other day I found some old notes from my first class with Barry (Theory of Knowledge, Fall 2014).
Barry closed the first lecture by saying that "philosophers have to be very good at making distinctions between things which are different”. That one really stuck with me.
Like many I was a huge admirer of Barry's -- as a philosopher and simply as a human being. He was the quintessential philosopher who was always trying to get to the bottom of the most important and difficult questions -- and then the deeper questions under those. As you might know he served as an adviser to OUP (what we call delegates) in the 1990's and early 2000's when I first started and I got to know, and respect, his sensibility -- a sharp intellect of course but in the context of his advice to OUP, a practical attitude about what really mattered. I was surprised and saddened to hear about his passing and I will miss him.
I unfortunately can't join for the memorial, but wanted to contribute two reminiscences about Barry's sense of humor:
-Barry was already sitting in Howison, scrutinizing my handout, when I came in to give my job talk, which argued that only those with knowledge can teach (according to Plato). Barry raised his hand. There were only a few other people already there; I was a bundle of nerves. "I've been teaching for years," he said, "but I'm not so sure about the other thing." I don't think anything else would have as effective at making me feel more at ease.
-In our first year seminar, we were all in awe of Barry (somehow Richard Wollheim seemed like a softy in comparison, for all his talk of "Freddy"), and his comments did nothing to dispel that awe. A (possible apocryphal) story circulated among us about Barry's comments. The story went that, on a paper which followed a lengthy Quine quote with the claim "it's not clear what Quine means by this," Barry had commented "He means this," followed by an arrow pointing back to that quote.
Impression of Barry Stroud
Barry Stroud and I enjoyed much intensive and extensive philosophical discussion, in person and in publications. We shared deep and abiding interest in issues of skepticism and epistemology more broadly. We repeatedly failed to agree but our exchange was among the most agreeable I’ve ever had with anyone. What made it so was the quality of his mind, by which I mean not just his impressive depth and sharpness, but also his elegance and thoughtfulness. That is the impression he left in me over many years, and it will never fade.
I thought I would share one memory of Barry Stroud from my graduate student days at Berkeley. Jennifer Hornsby was visiting to give a talk, maybe in my second year in graduate school. Her work was a huge inspiration to me when I first started thinking about doing philosophy of action. Somehow, I was invited to dinner with the faculty after Hornby’s talk probably along with a few other students. For a young graduate student, this was an absolutely intimidating and exhilarating gathering. Among Berkeley faculty, Bernard Williams was back on campus that semester and was at dinner as was Davidson, Richard Wollheim, and Barry, all trading stories with Hornsby about what seemed to me a golden age of philosophy in Oxford and elsewhere. I was mesmerized. I also had the good fortune of sitting next to Barry at the edge of that faculty group with the rest of the students (Davidson was to Barry's left, I to his right), and he amiably and easily engaged with the graduate students, putting me completely at ease. I still remember his expounding on the correct consistency of risotto, almost conspiratorially (the rice should jiggle just slightly when you shake the plate). He was, of course, an exceptional philosopher and teacher, but what I remember distinctly is his easygoing friendliness that evening. It made me feel like I belonged. I’m so sorry to not have seen in in many years, and even more sorry to hear of his passing.