Jeff Sicha

In 1962 Wilfrid came to Oberlin to conduct the oral examinations of the philosophy honors students. Bruce Anne who had studied with Wilfrid at Minnesota was then a member of the Oberlin philosophy department and was the one to suggest, if I remember correctly, that Wilfrid be the examiner. With Aune's help I was already an avid reader of Wilfrid's writings and looked forward to the occasion as a chance to meet someone I was tremendously impressed with.

My honors thesis had taken up questions about linguistic theories of the a priori and not unexpectedly Wilfrid was the featured philosopher in the latter parts of the thesis. In fact the main item treated in the final section was one of Wilfrid's [then] recently published works, "Grammar and Existence: A Preface to Ontology", a paper devoted to ontology and philosophy of logic. Given that setting, it was more than unexpected for Wilfrid to lead off my oral by asking whether I could "imagine shape without color". I replied that I thought that was possible; my exact words included the remark, "I can imagine shape without imagining color." Wilfrid's immediate response was that he had not asked me that; he had not asked whether I could "imagine shape without imagining color", but whether I could "imagine shape-without-color."

I found this beginning to many years of philosophical discussion quite exciting, as exciting as I found reading Wilfrid's works. The sense of being excited by conversations with Wilfrid or by reading his work has persisted through the years. To me, there was never any doubt about the prominent place Wilfrid ought to occupy in the history of philosophy. Where others have complained of difficulty in reading a paper of Wilfrid's, I saw only exciting passages, full of challenges and profundity.

Very early on, I became impressed with traits of Wilfrid's that I should like to call "personal philosophical traits", that is, features of a philosopher that have to do with philosophy but also with very common human emotions and impulses. One of the most important of these traits is illustrated by an incident in the early sixties. In 1964, I stopped briefly in Pittsburgh and sat in on several of Wilfrid's classes. I was, of course, just a graduate student at the time, and obviously, by any standard, reasonably young. I always thought of Wilfrid as being busy doing important things and as having more important people to talk to than me.

So, when I approached him after one of his classes, I had my questions and remarks concisely, and, I admit, bluntly formulated. In paricular, I had one criticism of a passage in "Time and the World Order". In offering a philosopher -- any philosopher, great or not -- a criticism, one would not think it at all unusual to discover that the philosopher had some affection for and emotional attachment to his, or her, own opinions. I quoted "Time and the World Order": "The more one appreciates the systematic character of the difference between the framework of things and the framework of 'events', the more one comes to realize that the latter framework is in the first instance simply a reaxiomatization of the former. . .".

My brusque criticism of this passage started with "That's wrong." and ended with references to other passages by Wilfrid which were inconsistent with that quotation. Wilfrid didn't bat an eye. "Yes", he said, "You're right, that's incorrect." It took me some time to appreciate how striking it was that he didn't waffle or try to rescue some part of his remark (something he could easily have done because of his italicized qualifier 'in the first instance'). Like others, Wilfrid doubtless had times when he wanted to defend himself even though he suspected he was wrong. But, all in all, over the years, I was again and again impressed by Wilfrid's commitment to being a "free spirit," a phrase he once used in describing another philosopher. Recently, having had the opportunity to look at some of the remarks he wrote in the margins of his own copies of his works, I was struck anew by his commitment to "getting it right" and acknowledging honestly the incorrectness of whatever he discovered to be wrong in his own views. In fact, even as an insensitive graduate student, the harshness of my criticisms of his work was no match for his own. Wilfrid had a dogged intellectual persistence to get to the bottom of a problem and this persistence and tenacity, combined with intellectual honesty, always won out no matter how much he might have liked what he wrote earlier.

Though I did not know it then, the tone and general form ol our philosophical discussions was set, in the sixties, by episodes like the one in 1964. In me, Wilfrid never faced a Thrasymachus. The dialectic of our discussions was more like that of The Republic after Book 1: there was a shared interest in working out and expanding a certain kind of view and criticisms were directed at the betterment of that view.

I do miss the philosophical discussions Wilfrid and I had. And the not so philosophical ones too, for in time, Wilfrid and I became friends. I find harder than I had anticipated to adjust to the fact that he is gone. I do take some consolation from knowing that his great body of philosophical work provides the means for pursuing our now decade old "dialectic" to which I was very pleased to be able to contribute in some small way: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."