Max Black (1909-1988)

Max Black died on August 27, 1988 in Ithaca New York, the location of Cornell University. He arrived there as Professor in 1946 and in 1954 was named to the Susan Linn Sage Chair in Philosophy and Humane Letters. He retired from teaching in 1977 but continued as Director and then participant in the Cornell Program in Science, Technology and Society until his death.

Max was born February 24, 1909 in Baku, in what is now the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic. The family emigrated to England when he was three. His pre- cocity and the scope of his intellectual gifts were recognized at the free school he first attended and at age nine a transfer to the more demanding Owen’s School was arranged. Mathematics was a focus of his academic interest and in 1927 he went up to Queens College, Cambridge, on scholarship to read mathe- matics. At Cambridge his horizons broadened. As a member of the Moral Sciences Club he had the opportunity to meet Moore, Russell and Ramsey who fired an interest in logic and related philosophical subjects. Also influ- ential were Cambridge literary theorists, critics and aestheticians such as Ogden, Richards and Empson. During his final year at Cambridge, at age twenty-one, he accepted Ogden’s invitation to contribute to the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. The outcome was The Nature of Mathematics which was published in 1933 and remains a staple of the literature. After completion of the BA, (1930) a post-graduate fellow- ship year was spent at GOttingen which provided opportunities for study with Weyl, Bernays and Hilbert. He described that experience as a “feast of rea- son”, but it was also a time of famine. There was a world wide depression and a scarcity of opportunities for academic employment. During the nine years after returning to England he taught mathematics, first at the Royal Grammar School at Newcastle-on-nne and then at the Teacher Training Institute of Education of London University. Despite the heavy load he completed the the Nature of Mathematics and in the year of its publication married Michal Landsberg. It was a lifetime love affair.

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In parallel with teaching Max enrolled in a doctoral program at the Uni- versity of London and also published numerous philosophical articles and reviews. In addition he made available to English readers some of the early translations of Frege and Carnap. In 1939 the dissertation, which was a criti- cal appraisal of versions of logical positivism, earned him the Ph. D. Black’s published work had meanwhile begun to gain considerable attention and in 1940, at the age of 31, he left for the United States to fill a position as Profes- sor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois. Six years later he joined the Cornell department. Max’s bibliography lists close to 250 items. Among book length treatises

are Language and Philosophy (1949), Models and Metaphors (1962). A Com- panion to Wittgenstein ’s ?Factatus (1965), The Labyrinth of Language (1968), Margins of Precision (1970) Caveats and Critiques (1975). and me Prevalence of Humbug (1983). A posthumous volume of essays is due for publication. The text, Critical Thinking, has been in continuous use since its 1954 publica- tion. He also edited several volumes on special topics to which he also contri- buted. Among them are The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons (1961), The Morality of Scholarship (1967), and Art, Perception, and ReaIity (1972). Some of his books have been translated into at least seven languages.

Black was no builder of metaphysical systems; an enterprise which along with so many of his contemporaries he viewed as unproductive. Some of his work was exegetical and interpretive as in the massive study of Wittgenstein’s 7kactatus and shorter commentaries on Frege, Dewey, Russell, Tarski and others. But that was ancillary to what became his central preoccupation with conceptud clarity and sound argument as they could be employed in addres- sing well delineated philosophical questions. He was not a formalist in his philosophical writing. His work was always tempered by a sensitivity to com- mon language, common knowledge, and common sense. He wrote on topics such as the nature of rules, presupposition, vagueness and reasoning with loose concepts, the misguidedness of the picture theory of language, metaphor, puzzles about choice; the list is long. He also returned intermittently to foun- dational questions in the sciences which marked some of his early writing. Black subscribed to Russells claim.. . “though analysis gives us the truth and nothing but the truth, yet it cannot give us the whole truth. This is the only sense in which the doctrine [that analysis is falsification] is to be accepted. In a wider sense it becomes merely a cloak for laziness, by giving an excuse to those .who dislike the labour of analysis”. (Principles of Mathematics, p. 141).

It has been convincingly shown by historians of public health and by demographers that where societies or groups have comparably high levels of health and longevity, a primary explanation is to be found in preventative

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measures. One view of some of Max’s achievement is that he has analogously contributed to our intellectual health. But like those who effected preventative health measures, or scientists whose negative experiments have cleared a path, his contributions have sometimes failed to receive the recognition they deserve when measured against their influence.

Consistent with a belief in the clarificatory function of philosophy as he practiced it, Max was of the conviction “that a philosopher in a more modest role of rational critic in pursuit of clear ideas and sound reaions can help thoughtful non-professionals to cope with issues of serious public and private concern”. Not only were many of his essays written to that end but he was .active in support of a variety of interdisciplinary projects. He played a foun- ders role in the establishment of the Society of the Humanities at Cornell which he served as Director from its inception in 1961 to 1971, He was also the initiator of the White Professors-at-large program for visitors of distinction in the arts and science and served as Director from 1965 to 1978. It was with con- siderable regret that he noted to me the extent to which those programs in which he had played a seminal role, have in recent years sponsored “post- structuralist literary theorists” with philosophical aspirations whose putative “philosophical” ramblings he regarded as “quintessential academic hum- bug”. He took comfort in the resistance of the philosophical community to the logomachy of that movement with its cultish enthusiasms and political energy. He regretted the susceptibility of those in some other disciplines.

Max was indefatiguable in his service to the profession. He served in an editorial capacity and as consultant to journals and publishers. He was active in several professional associations. Among offices to which he was elected were those of the President o f , the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and President of the Institut International de Philosophie. He was widely sought as a lecturer, for visiting teaching or research appointments, or fel- lowships, which took him to Australia, Scandinavia, India, Japan, Israel, Continental Europe as well as Oxford and Cambridge. Within the USA he held visiting fellowships at the Princeton and Stanford Institutes of Advanced Study and the National Humanities Center. Although he was an inveterate traveller and comfortably multilingual, he relished each return to the rural quietude and aesthetically comforting surroundings of his home in Ithaca.

Only a full scale biography would be adequate to such a many faceted life. But some mention should be made of features which made Max so memorable to those who knew him more than casually. He is remembered as a dazzling lecturer and a polymath. Some former students were put off by his sharp and astringent style but others emphasize that it was Max who taught them to

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distinguish between philosophical and personal disagreement. Some observed that caustic criticism was reserved for the better students and that his personal kindness was unbounded. He is also remembered as a good companion, a good friend and “a thoroughly good person”.

Max was an accomplished pianist with a vast knowledge of the musical literature although he gave up playing several years ago. He had a keen inter- est in the visual arts. He was also a self taught chess prodigy who achieved considerable status but eschewed professional competition as too absorbing. He did enjoy informal games and engaging in demonstrations of blindfold and simultaneous play. But this is not a full scale biography which remains to be written. I’ll conclude with a statement of self appraisal which Max wrote in 1987.

“On the whole I see my work as having been marked by a concern for reasonableness, restrained by a conviction that rationality is not enough; commitment to common sense of a kind that does not shy away from science and philosophy; appreciation and distrust of abstract models; as much interest in unformulated stratagems and implicit understandings of speech as in normative codes of grammar and logic.

Although no enemy of theory, I have always been interested, like a poet, in minute particulars. Striving to live in “uncertainty, mysteries, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats) is occasionally rewarded by calm and exhilara- ted contemplation: it is a well kept secret that philosophical investigation. like music. can be enjoyable. For glimpses of my own “way of life”, a curious reader is referred especially to the essays on humaneness and humbug (in The Prevalence of Humbug, (1983) with their emphasis on “fellow feeling” and respect for the integrity of other human beings: my moral position can be crystallized in the . . . maxim “Do no harm!”

(I am grateful to the several correspondents who contributed to the writing

Ruth Barcan Marcus of this memorial statement.)

Dialectics Vol. 44, NO 1-2 (1990)