In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

EPILOGUE THE PERSONAL VALUE AND SOCIAL USEFULNESS OF PHILOSOPHY I was born on July 17, 1934, in Budapest, Hungary. There was little in my family background to suggest a future in philosophy.My father was a lumberman and my mother, though a cultured woman, occupied herself primarily with taking care of our home. No one on either side of my family had gone to college. Enduring daily bombings in the SecondWorldWar,the long Soviet siege of Budapest,and the subsequent Russian occupation provided ample opportunities for the development of latent reflective tendencies; nothing jolts one into thinking about life as effectively as the sight of gratuitous violence and sudden death.I started thinking about the evanescence of life and the uncontrollability of fortune even though I was only ten, and tried my hand at rendering my ideas, and my distress, in poetic form. The “nationalization” of my father’s small business by the communist government and my family’s consequent passing without passports through two patrolled borders to flee Hungary created additional invitations to reflect. Immigration to Canada, and later to the United States, gave me a great deal of material for thought about language, differences among cultures, and the relations of individuals to their communities. I spent a year in a Canadian high school and then entered McGill University. It was easy for philosophy to find me.My experiences predisposed me to be interested in momentous issues:I wanted to know about God,the meaning of life, and the right comportment toward death. I found working with ideas irresistibly attractive and wished to develop resources for effective reflection on human nature.At McGill, the only question I needed to ask was which of the many departments that vied for the attention of students dealt with the topics I wanted to investigate.Upon being told that it was philosophy,I signed up as a major. McGill University offered me a thorough, historical introduction to philosophy. Although the faculty lacked high-profile publishers, it included a wealth of good scholars. Cecil Currie taught me Kant and exquisite atten- THE PERSONAL VALUE AND SOCIAL USEFULNESS OF PHILOSOPHY 183 tion to texts.Alastair McKinnon, whose love of Kierkegaard was contagious, engaged in a losing struggle to meet the department’s absurd requirement that he teach logic. Raymond Klibansky, the scope of whose knowledge was legendary but whose thought was severely handicapped by excessive learning ,set the highest standards for dealing with works in foreign languages and for mastery of the history of thought. For a while at McGill, I thought I was called to the ministry. Reading Hume’s Dialogues had a devastating effect on this career option; I could not imagine serving a God whose existence I was unable to demonstrate. It took me many years to realize that rational proofs don’t need to play a significant role in one’s religious life.I came to this conclusion partly as a result of listening to Paul Tillich in New Haven and discussing religion with John Burbidge, a fellow student,who later distinguished himself as a commentator on Hegel. As philosophers must,I now reserve the right to interpret and to embrace the mysteries of Christianity in my own way. My recent writings attempt to articulate ways in which a commitment to transcendence can be combined with cold-eyed naturalism. My interest is in seeing religion as a celebration of life rather than as a consolation for its losses and our finitude. The thought of George Santayana found me through the agency of T. G. Henderson, chair of the McGill department, who had written on Santayana withWhitehead and decided to teach Scepticism and Animal Faith in a senior seminar. I struggled for months to find the decisive weakness of the book, believing that in some fashion that kept eluding me, Santayana was clearly cheating. I fought the book so hard that it became a part of my life. Both my master’s thesis and my doctoral dissertation were focused on Santayana’s philosophy of mind, and for perhaps ten years I may have been the only living epiphenomenalist in the world. The articles I published in the 1960s on this odd but permanently tempting theory did not attract much attention.When philosophers feel compelled to adopt the view, they seem to want to think through its ramifications each time anew, all on their own. By tradition, McGill sent its philosophy graduates...

Share