December 13, 2008
I stumbled upon your J.N. Findlay website quite by accident this morning; but I am glad I did, since I enjoyed browsing there for a pleasant half hour.
So let me express my gratitude by sharing a few of my own recollections of Prof. Findlay.
I was a PhD student of Philosophy at Yale from 1966 to 1971, a classmate of Doug Lackey, whom you mention on site. I took only one class with Findlay, but it was unforgettable: a class on Hegel's Logic, in which the entire class read the Lesser Logic (in the Wallace translation) and each student had to prepare a presentation on a specific section of the text, based on the Science of Logic.
What I most remember about that class is Findlay's peculiar and peculiarly effective method of "lecturing while writing and erasing," which you describe so well. At some point early in the semester he began distributing his lectures in rather crudely typed and mimeographed form at the beginning of each class (shades of Fichte and the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre!), and then proceeded to read them to us while again writing them on the board. We could not believe it, but it turned out to be most effective! My nearly complete set of those often-reread mimeographed lectures is one of my most cherished mementos of my years in New Haven.
I recall how one day in class, in the course of a discussion of Hegel's critical account of "mechanism" Findlay, blustering in his usual red-faced manner, sputtered -- nay, fairly hissed -- that defenders of a mechanistic world picture absurdly "wanted to think of themselves as bicycles." Case closed, he seemed to be saying!
Another memory: Findlay never failed to attend any of the well-attended guest lecturers sponsored by the philosophy department during those years and he invariably was among the first to stand up and pose a question to the speaker. Invariably as well, his was the most penetrating question. On more than one occasion I witnessed speakers reduced to near silence by the same. My friends and I joked that if we were ever to be in a situation of reading a professional paper and saw Findlay in the audience, we would simply refuse to go on.
Finally, I recall very well the farewell bash for Findlay held at the Yale College (Branford?) with which he was associated. He gave a talk to a very large audience, consisting almost entirely of students. I think only one member of the Yale philosophy faculty (Karsten Harries) had the courtesy to attend. But what was memorable was the substance of the lecture, in which Findlay spoke positively about psychotrophic drugs (this was the late sixties, remember?) and connected drug experiences to his own rational mysticism, to Platonism, etc. He was not, of course, advocating drug usage, but he showed an understanding and appreciation of what was happening then in the youth culture that completly escaped colleagues half his age. It was a brave thing to do.
I don't think I made much of a personal impression upon Findlay. (I will never forget the disappointment of receiving back my 40 page term paper on Hegel's Logic of Essence with no comments except a grade of A on the last page and the sentence "I can find nothing to disagree with in this paper.") But he made an indelible one upon me.
Thank you for your web site
Dan Breazeale
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Daniel Breazeale
Professor and Acting Chair
Department of Philosophy
University of Kentucky
Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences