Philosopher Tom Carson (Loyola/Chicago) writes:
Your readers might be interested in this anecdote about Paul Weiss.
I have a close male friend going back to high school whose mother I knew quite well; she was my friend for many years. She was an English Professor who had a great interest in philosophy. She was very pleased when I decided to study philosophy. But she was surprised and disappointed to learn that I didn’t know anything about Paul Weiss and hadn’t read anything that he wrote. She praised Weiss’s teaching in extravagant terms and told me the following story. Around 1940, she was a student at Bryn Mawr. She took a course with Weiss. Weiss told the students that philosophy involved the radical questioning and examination of all our important beliefs. He said that his students needed to examine all of their important beliefs and that they needed to actively question and suspend their most cherished beliefs as part of their work for the class. She took Weiss to mean that students shouldn’t continue to act on their moral and religious beliefs before examining them. Dutifully following Weiss’s instructions, she stole a vase from an antique’s store. She was almost immediately stricken with guilt and after suffering considerable anguish she returned to the store with the vase hidden under a large coat. She awkwardly returned the vase and ran out of the store.
Weiss had powerful influence on many of his students. Many impressionable young women at Bryn Mawr were very attracted by what my friend described as Weiss’s tough New York street-wise persona that was foreign to most of them. Weiss was very notable as a teacher and for his role in founding The Review of Metaphysics, which was a very major journal while he was its editor. Hardly anyone reads him any more and I don’t think that he was ever an important figure in mainstream philosophy.
Brand Blanshard deserves praise for his role in hiring Weiss at Yale. But many people think that his role in helping to deny Charles Stevenson tenure (because of his disdain for Stevenson’s emotivism) reflects very poorly on him.
I thank Professor Carson for permission to share this great story!
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