Long-time reader Dave Bagwill wrote to tell me that he tried to contact his old professor at Cal State, Hayward, Elizabeth Wolgast, but was too late. "She was a very fine woman with a penetrating intellect and a warm heart," Dave recalls. From Wolgast's obituary:
Elizabeth H. Wolgast
Feb 27, 1929 - Oct 13, 2020
Elizabeth Wolgast, died October 13 from complications following a stroke on October 1: she was 91. Elizabeth was born in Dunellen, NJ in February 1929. In 1936 her family moved to a farm outside Philadelphia run by her mother (a degreed nutritionist) while her father worked in business. She studied water-color painting as a young woman which became a life-long passion for her. She met her husband, Richard, at a drawing class at Cornell University and they married in 1949. Elizabeth went on to earn a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington and had a long, distinguished career teaching at the Cal State University at Hayward. She was a trailblazer in her profession being the first tenured female professor in that department. She was still the only one there when she retired. She enjoyed visiting professorships at Dartmouth College, Cambridge (England), West Point, and Abo (Finland). She authored four philosophy texts and numerous journal articles.
Read the rest. Here is her PhilPapers page.
I just now ordered a used copy of Wolgast's Paradoxes of Knowledge for a paltry $8.34. You may wish to spring for a new copy for a mere 529 semolians.
We best honor a philosopher by reading his work and thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically.
As a general rule, you should never buy a book you haven't read. (That sounds like a bit of a paradox itself.) But the Wolgast volume appeared under the Cornell imprint, so it is probably worth reading in part if not in toto. I sense that it will be heavily Wittgensteinian. But a little Wittgenstein never hurt anybody.
Time was, when I had space for books but no money. Now it is the other way around. I may have to buy a bigger house. Without books would life be worth living?
In these trying times, we who value high culture need to build vast private libraries that cannot be easily marauded by the totalitarian agents of leftist destruction. We also need to lay in righteous supplies of Pb to protect them.
Theme music: It's Too Late, She's Gone
Recent Comments