Chaucer directed his wonderful poem Troilus and Criseyde to two of his
admired friends: the trilingual poet John Gower and Ralph Strode, a logician
from Merton College, Oxford. He called
the one moral Gower and the other philosophical Strode. The adjectives sound heavy and stilted to us
today, perhaps even ironical; but Chaucer meant them as straight and highly
complimentary. It’s rather a pity that philosophical in particular has lost its
old juice. To be philosophical about
something these days is to be uncomplaining, pragmatic, or resigned. In Boethius and other early writers
“philosophy” can indeed lead its votaries to an attitude of indifference or
even scorn toward many of the things that animate the rat race, but the word
itself is true to its noble etymological origins—the love of wisdom.
All this comes to mind because we just
spent two days last week at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia, the city in which Benjamin Franklin and others founded it in 1743. In its name we have the dignity of the older
meaning of the word. “The first drudgery
of settling new colonies is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote, “and there
are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford
leisure to cultivate the finer arts, and improve the common stock of
knowledge.” The principal purpose of the
Society would be to promote “useful” knowledge—particularly the application of
new scientific knowledge and technological developments to the advancement of
human health, welfare, and general felicity.
Its most obvious antecedent model was the Royal Society of London,
founded in 1660; but there were, or soon would be, similar sodalities of the
benevolent learned wherever the Enlightenment had taken root. It was not explicitly a political
organization. But people interested in
the betterment of mankind often think, rightly or wrongly, in political terms;
and the Society really got going in the 1770s just as our nation really got
going. Among its early luminaries were
many of our great Founders, including Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Monroe, and
Washington. Thomas Jefferson was
actually the president of the Philosophical Society while he was President of
the United States. To recall such names is to revel, licitly, in national
pride; but it is also a sadly archaeological exercise. As you catch glimpses of our national leaders
today on CNN how many “philosophers” can you count?
The Society’s grand old buildings
are in the historic center of Philadelphia, very near to Independence
Hall. The library is one of the
intellectual jewels of the early Republic.
Among its treasures are the original journals of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition. Like many early American
intellectuals Jefferson was eclectic in his interests, which included
agriculture, history, literature, and archaeology. Everything about native Americans interested
him, particularly Indian languages. The
Enlightenment was an age of great systems, and he and others hoped it might be
possible to construct a universal linguistic map, which might deconstruct the
Tower of Babel. To this day the library
remains an important world resource for the study of America languages.
There are of course limits to the
traditionalism of an organization dedicated to intellectual progress. What we are now calling the STEM fields are
probably still most thoroughly represented in the membership, but there are
also artists, poets, musicians and quite a few humanities professors from
fields less obviously “useful” than organic chemistry or applied mathematics. At the meeting just concluded outgoing
president Clyde Barker, an eminent transplant surgeon and medical educator,
passed the gavel on to Linda Greenhouse, a prominent journalist and legal
expert. There is an actual gavel,
incidentally, though it looks more like a detached door knocker than a
hammer. Naturally, it once was wielded
by Jefferson.
A meeting of the APS consists principally in
hearing a series of diverse, carefully prepared learned talks pitched for a
diversely learned audience, and then schmoozing about them with interesting
people over nibbles. Two of the themes
last week were the growing impact of artificial intelligence on the professions
and various aspects of observable climate change. Sometimes what is observable in the very old
tells us important things about the very new.
There are scholar-adventurers who seek out the oldest ice in the world
and dendro-chronologists (“tree ring” experts) who wrest from the carcasses of
long dead forests information about the here and now.
One odd feature of academic life as
a university professor is that one is surrounded by great lecturers whose
lectures one never hears. By chance I got to hear two dynamic talks by a couple
of my own Princeton colleagues—something that I would never get to do under
ordinary circumstances. The
astrophysicist David Spergel explained both
of Einstein’s relativity theories in six minutes flat, and the Sinologist
Martin Kern introduced us to the treasure trove of ancient Chinese bamboo
manuscripts recovered from grave sites.
We returned from our
“philosophical” weekend refreshed in mind and body.
