Sidney Morgenbesser


Sidney Morgenbesser was an American philosopher and professor at Columbia University. He wrote little but is remembered by many for his philosophical witticisms.

Life and career

Sidney Morgenbesser was born on September 22, 1921, in New York City and raised in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Morgenbesser undertook philosophical studies at the City College of New York, graduating in 1941. He then undertook rabbinic studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, receiving his degree there in 1944. His Times obituarist notes that "He was ordained, lost his faith, and never tried too hard to find it again", swapping "belief for doubt rather than the certainty of atheism".
Morgenbesser then pursued graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. There he obtained his M.A. in 1950 and, with a thesis titled Theories and Schemata in the Social Sciences, his Ph.D. in 1956. It was also at Pennsylvania that, Morgenbesser reports, he held his first teaching job in philosophy and met Hilary Putnam as a student. He would also teach at Swarthmore College and the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of The New School for Social Research.
In 1953, he came to work at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, joining the philosophy department in 1955. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1963, and by 1966 was made a full professor at Columbia. He was visiting professor at the Rockefeller University in 1967—1968 and also held visiting positions at Princeton University and the Hebrew University. In 1975 he was named the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, a position he held until his retirement, as emeritus, in 1991. He continued to occasionally teach as a special lecturer there until 1999.
Morgenbesser's areas of expertise included the philosophy of social science, political philosophy, epistemology, and the history of American Pragmatism. He founded the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs along with G. A. Cohen, Thomas Nagel and others.
Morgenbesser appeared in an interview by Bryan Magee on the topic of American Pragmatism in 1987.
He died on 1 August 2004 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan at the age of 82, from complications due to ALS.

Influence

Morgenbesser was known particularly for his sharp witticisms and humor which often penetrated to the heart of the philosophical issue at hand, on which account The New York Times Magazine dubbed him the "Sidewalk Socrates." According to one anecdote, when J. L. Austin claimed that, although a double negative often implies a positive meaning, there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative, Morgenbesser retorted: "Yeah, yeah." In another commonly reported story, Morgenbesser was asked by a student whether he agreed with Chairman Mao's view that a statement can be both true and false at the same time, to which Morgenbesser replied "Well, I do and I don't."
Another anecdote is given as follows by the Independent:
Morgenbesser published little and established no school, but was revered for his extraordinary intelligence and moral seriousness. He was a famously influential teacher; his former students included Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Alvin Goldman, Daniel M. Hausman, Robert Nozick, Hilary Putnam, Gideon Rosen, Mark Steiner, and Michael Stocker. In 1967, Morgenbesser signed a letter declaring his intention to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and urging other people to also take this stand.

Works

Books, (co-)edited

Select articles, book chapters (co-)authored

For a more complete record of publications see "Sidney Morgenbesser: A Bibliography" in the below.
FestschriftHow Many Questions?: Essays in Honour of Sidney Morgenbesser, Leigh S. Cauman, Isaac Levi, Charles D. Parsons and Robert Schwartz