Thanksgiving 2007

This Thanksgiving, I have been thinking about Rogers Albritton--the great Wittgensteinian philosopher and the single most significant influence on my intellectual development.  I took every class that Albritton offered at UCLA in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Albritton taught the value of clarity, and of not giving up on a problem no matter how long it took.  In the past few weeks, I've been working on a paper entitled "Semantic Originalism."  The roots of the paper are in a conversation that I had with Albritton more than twenty-five years ago.  Albritton told me to read Paul Grice, and since that conversation I've returned to Grice's work, again and again, in a long, slow, and painful effort to understand how laws mean.  A lesson that Albritton taught and I have only recently begun to appreciate is that some work cannot be done in a week, a month, a year, or even a decade.

Thank you Rogers.