Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame by Kenneth M. Sayre (review)

Long time Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame Kenneth Sayre offers here a history of the Department. It is perhaps more of a personal history, in parts almost a memoir, than a historical work. Much of the book pivots around the career of Ernan McMullin, who did much to shape the Department, and the role of Ralph McInerny who never gave up trying to restore the role that Thomism once played in the Department. Some pages are devoted to Alvin Plantinga and Alasdair MacIntyre, who are surely the most significant philosophers of those long associated with the Department. But readers who would like to find engaging anecdotes or even narrow discussion about the philosophical achievements of these people will be disappointed. The same is true of anyone who wishes to discover more about important members of the Department such as Karl Ameriks, Robert Audi, and Peter van Inwagen: only passing references are made to them and their work. One looks in vain for any reference to Paul W. Franks who taught there for several years and added a luster that has since vanished from South Bend.

There are valuable moments in the book, especially the story of how the Department came to have several supporters of Wilfred Sellars (Delaney, Loux, Soloman, and Gutting), although no mention is made of whether or not anyone today is interested in the most important heirs of Sellars, namely Robert Brandom and John McDowell. There are occasional snippets of gossip, such as the tidbit that reveals that Roderick Chisholm had a problem with alcohol (and knew he did: he didn’t like to speak after cocktail hour). In general, though, little dirty laundry is aired: a nasty moment to do with spousal hiring in another Department is calmly glossed over. Yet a not particularly dramatic event, the relieving of Ralph McInerny from the Directorship of the Medieval Institute, is made to seem far worse than it was. McInerny was “fired” from the position, we are told, and given a “severance package” (156). But McInerny had tenure, of course, kept his Chair, and was simply moved sideways to direct the Maritain Center.

Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame is written in a workaday prose. One would not wish to read it for its style or narrative command; it is tedious for long stretches, unbalanced in its attention to members of the Department, and loses focus at the end, when a long account of the visit of President Obama to Notre Dame is given, all hinging on no more than the fact that the President of the University, John Jenkins, is also a member of the Department. Nor is the book free from errors: Robert Louis Wilken, the eminent patrologist, is renamed “Robert Wilkins” (116), Martin Heidegger is characterized as an “existentialist” (111) when he is nothing of the kind, and one wishes that the whole had been lightly edited to eliminate jargon such as “book-length publication” (when Sayre means “book”) and “persona” (when he means “life” or “character” or something of the sort). All in all, the narrative could have been bound and left in the Philosophy Department for reference. There is no need for it to have been published by Notre Dame Press.