Just the thought of having to deal with “S” is true just in case S terrifies me, and I have even more respect for my wife for having done grad work in philosophy (though she sensibly didn’t try to make a career of it). I wrote a sentence that Judith Jarvis Thomson admired. “I like IT!” That was a wonderful moment that I’ve carried with me for thirty-four years. “I don’t just like its length,” she told me. “You just like it because it’s short,” I told her, as I knew she had disliked my long, flowery, dare I say eloquent, sentences. It was: “Two things seem to me to be true.” She brightened upon reading it. On another paper, when I had underlined one particular point for emphasis, she told me: “You think that if you say it loudly enough, people won’t hear how false it is.” I finally wrote a paper that began with a sentence that pleased her. For one paper, she commented on my tendency to switch terminology: I’d talk about “duties” for a while, and then, to add some interest, I’d vary my vocabulary a bit and start talking about “obligations.” She taught me not to do that, that the reader was going to become alarmed: wait, a new term has been introduced, why? She taught me that the point of writing was actually to SAY SOMETHING.
JUDITH JARVIS THOMSON HOW TO
Judy Thomson taught me even more about how to write than she taught me about how to do philosophy. Asked for further guidelines to assist us in writing the paper, she gave us this one: “No eloquence!” I felt as if she was addressing that pithy piece of advice directly to me. Thomson turned to the chalkboard and wrote: “S” is true just in case S. “Is there a variety of utilitarianism which is true? If so, which? And why? If not, why not?” One student put up his hand right away: “What do you mean, ‘is true’?” Without a word, Prof. Here is the paper assignment for our second paper for the class, due April 7, 1975. (At MIT, departments don’t have names, they have numbers, so 24 is Philosophy – I soon learned from my classmates that it was an error to refer to the course as PHIL 24.231 – PHIL was redundant, as 24 already WAS Phil.) Here is my notebook from the first one: 24.231. Thomson through the Wellesley-MIT exchange. When I was an undergraduate at Wellesley, I took courses with Prof.
I was asked to give this introduction because I knew Judith Jarvis Thomson not only as a brilliant thinker, but as a brilliant teacher. To quote the start of Justin Weinberg’s Daily Nous obit, “Judith Jarvis Thomson, professor emerita of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most influential moral philosophers of the past 50 years, has died.” I don’t normally commemorate philosophers at LH (though I’ve actually read or skimmed a couple of her articles), but there were some things in Claudia Mills‘ introduction of Thomson at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in 2009 (quoted at the link) that resonated enough with me that I wanted to quote them: