Adolf Grunbaum (original) (raw)

### Adolf Grunbaum

During the heyday of logical empiricism in America, I first met Wilfrid at a philosophy of science meeting held at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Boston. As a whipper-snapper graduate student, I was in awe of him. But I was heartened by his immediate disclosure of rejection of phenomenalistic positivism. Though he was affable, he struck me, even then, as basically shy.

This shyness was driven home to me, when I spent more time with him at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, where he was closely associated with his colleague Herbert Feigl. One day, when Wilfrid, Herbert and I were at lunch in a Minneapolis restaurant, Herbert's wife Maria walked in unexpectedly and came over to our table to greet us. Wilfrid blushed like an adolescent school boy, though he was anything but a shrinking violet in Center seminars. Years later, here in Pittsburgh, when my daughter was four years old, she gave him a vigorous hug. Wilfrid froze and couldn't handle it. Over the years, I came to believe that his fundamental shyness and reserve were simply belied by a forbidding facade, which made him appear regal and yes, even olympian, as he conveyed a sovereign sense of his intellectual powers.

He coped with his shyness, and put himself more at ease with people in social situation by making professional conversation his primary mode of interaction with others. This style misled many people into thinking that he was a cold fish. But, as his personal friends and former students know very well, he could let his hair down when relaxing with them at professional meetings over a meal or drink. And I bear witness that, if one got close to him, he was kind, indeed sweet and affectionate. These qualities were not lost on his secretary Mary Connor, as shown by her enormous loyalty and indefatiguable devotion to him, which went far beyond the call of duty. Earlier, his secretary Ruth Durst was also patently very fond of him. And the big book that our doctoral student, Johanna Seibt, recently wrote about his philosophy bears the earmarks of feelings that are not confined to intellectual respect. Alas, those who knew him only superficially often tended to see him as an intellectual Brahmin, so preoccupied with his own thoughts as to be functionally thoughtless toward others in various ways. Yet when a colleague and friend of his was aggrieved, it was Wilfrid who spoke out emphatically in favor of taking action against the culprit.

In my recollections for our 1987 Colloquium on Sellarsian Philosophy, I reminisced nostalgically about the way in which Wilfrid's academic odyssey intersected with mine and eventuated in his being a star on this campus for the last quarter century. But even a decade before he came to Pitt, our personal bonds were solidified by a shared philosophical allegiance to a naturalistic, secular world-view that includes atheism. Like his distinguished father Roy Wood Sellars, Wilfrid was a vigorous champion of a naturalistic ontology.

What consolation, you may ask, does the ideology we shared offer me now that we have lost him? Our world-view celebrates the fragrance of a rose amid the splendor of Wilfrid's gardens, the exhilarations of our work and friendship, the professional encouragements we gave to one another, the sounds of music, the embrace of someone we love, the panorama of a glorious sunrise or sunset, the biological pleasures of the body, and the delights of wit and humor. Bertrand Russell said it masterfully and unforgettably in his "A Free Man's Worship" [in Mysticism and Logic, Allen & Unwin, London, 1917, pp. 47-48]:

> That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. > > How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control Man is yet free, during his brief years to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Wilfrid was a paragon of just that noonday brightness of human intellect. And the light from his intellect will illuminate the future for many generations.