Remembering Leonard Linsky (1922-2012)

[This is a follow up to this post.]

When I arrived at The University of Chicago (1995), Leonard Linsky's weekly, Friday afternoon reading group on the Investigations was already years old. It was timed not to interfere with departmental colloquia, or the departmental coffee hour. Even though Leonard had officially retired, it attracted the best and brightest graduate students who would talk about it for days after. I had not yet acquired a taste for close reading, and the devotional quality to the reading group put me off. This did not stop me from being fascinating by Leonard--there was a dogged rumor on campus that one of the characters in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying was loosely based on him.

Leonard and I got to know each other by hanging in Classics cafe, which -- absent graduate student offices -- was my office. When I first met Leonard he was except for great pride in his son, Bernard, perhaps, disenchanted with philosophy, even its twentieth century history. In fact, I got the sense that the Wittgenstein reading group was a kind of lifeline to a lost world, once intimately familiar to him. It might have had something to do with the fact that his wife, Joanne, required increasing amount of health care. It didn't stop him from talking, and he was a source of endless, fascinating anecdotes about the department and the giants of analytical philosophy from earlier generations. I seem to recall learning from him during this period that he spent part of his youth in the desert for health reasons. He also had plenty to say on art and literature, including his share of novelists he had known (but no mention of Jong).

One day, he waived a book excitedly at me and started arguing passionately with me about an (to me) obscure passage in (I think) Gödel. After a while of back and forth, he said he had rediscovered his philosophical interests. After that he would corner me whenever he saw me, including the Bonjour Bakery practically each morning after I walked my dog. (As the reminiscences reported here reveal, Leonard was  a vibrant presence for lots of people.) Philosophy was the oxygen of his life, even though it was not his whole life. Sometimes he would drop hints about dabbling on the stock market, and once he learned that I was writing on Adam Smith's economics he assumed (wrongly) that we shared some political views.

I have never met a very succesful, professional philosopher before or since who seemed so excited about talking about other people's philosophies. (I never heard him even mention his own work on referring or oblique contexts.) This does not mean he found much merit in all other philosophers. I remember with bemused horror that one day he found my dog and me reading Hume outside at the Bonjour. He sat down, picked up the Treatise, and started reading the first full paragraph with a clear voice. When he was done, he laughed and just said, "this is crazy."

Like many folk at Chicago, Leonard welcomed the influx of appointments of people sympathetic to Wittgensteinian philosophy. But as the old core of the Wittgenstein group left after graduation, this growth was transforming his reading group into a more formal academic workshop with invited speakers. Much to my surprise he shared dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. I pounced on the opportunity, and proposed a Summer reading group on Carnap's Meaning and Necessity. Leonard took his duties very seriously and prepared extensive notes before each session. We ended up discussing quite a bit of Russell & Whitehead  as well as a surprising amount of C.I. Lewis alongside Carnap. It was undoubtedly among the intellectual highlights of my graduate career. Along the way he taught us that to understand the reception of analytical philosophy Stateside we had to read Alonzo Church's reviews and notes. (Surprisingly enough despite the fact that he did his PhD at Berkeley, Tarski did not figure much in his stories.)

Leonard was much beloved in the department. Sometimes such statements are hard to believe and even worse to prove. Yet here goes: nobody objected and many embraced with enthusiasm, Martin Lin's proposal to put together a (a surprisingly succesful and enduring) Intramural philosophy department basketball team, the Leonard Linsky's All Stars.