The Precise Philosopher

One appreciates the precision. Some years after the 1968 student riots at Columbia University, the philosopher and Columbia professor Sidney Morgenbesser, who had been beaten up by the police,

was being questioned for a panel for jury duty. One of the questions was, “Have you ever been treated unjustly or unfairly by the police?” His reply was classic: “I’ve been treated unjustly but not unfairly. They were clobbering everybody.”

Morgenbesser, according to the eulogy reprinted in The Tablet on the tenth anniversary of his death, is also the one who famously, when a philosopher “asserted in a lecture that, whereas in many languages a double negative makes a positive, in no language does a double positive make a negative,” replied  “Yeah, yeah.”

The art historian Arthur Danto tells this story:

“We were having lunch once when someone he knew stopped and told us how busy he was: ‘So busy I don’t know whether I exist.’ To which Sidney said, ‘Think a little,’ and went on eating.”