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Memorial Minutes for Morris Grossman Morris Grossman, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fairfield University, died on December 12, 2012, at the age of 90. He was one of the longest-standing members of SAAP. An early meeting of the Society was held at Fairfield, and there was a reception at Morris's Fairfield apartment—an occasion on which I first met the colleagues who became my friends over the 40-plus years I have been a member myself. Morris became one of the dearest of friends. The facts of Morris's life are simple (though I would like to mention that in looking up these facts I discovered that one Morris Grossman was a well-known mobster in the early days of the twentieth century, killed in a mob hit; I think the contrast of this Morris Grossman and our colleague would have been one that amused him!). To return to our Morris, he was born in New York City and grew up in Manhattan; his dad was a physician, his mom a fluent speaker of Yiddish (a language whose music and nuances Morris always enjoyed.) Morris had a brother (recently deceased) and sister (currently residing in Pennsylvania) with whom he was very close. He continued his close family feelings with nephews and nieces, and enjoyed the warmth of this extended family—for the most part! He was educated at Stuyvesant High School, and received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His Dissertation, defended in 1960, was "Santayana as Dramatist and Dialectician: A Critical Estimate Made with the Help of Unpublished Manuscripts." This exploration of Santayana was the basis of much of Morris Grossman's later published works. As Martin Coleman has already elegantly developed Morris Grossman's views of Santayana and has gracefully summarized Morris' philosophic leitmotif: An undeniable thematic unity runs through the last forty years of Morris Grossman's work in which he explored the importance for philosophy, art, and life of preserving the tension between that which may be unified and that which is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. He examined this tension in literature, artistic performance, economics, statecraft, and human rights; in religion, drama, sculpture, philosophical methodology, biography, and human attitudes toward mortality; in the work of Gotthold Lessing, Lewis Carroll, Peirce, Tolstoy, James, Sartre, and Beardsley; and most regularly in the work of George Santayana. I shall not try to repeat Coleman's contribution. Rather I shall try to discuss Morris in other terms: contributor to American philosophy in so many ways, pianist, composer, lover of music and poetry, ironic and contrarian commentator, and extraordinarily generous friend. Let's start with his wonderful, irritating, often self-deprecating irony. In a review of Richard Smyth's Reading Peirce Reading, Morris quoted Smyth saying '"It will be recalled (Morris's italics) that Schiller's work was inspired by the failure of the French Revolution and by the great question which that failure posed to the friends of the revolution.' (p. 275) Truth to tell, it had slipped my mind!"
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Title | page 47 |
Item ID | BulletinSantayana2013-048_page 47.tiff |
Transcript | Memorial Minutes for Morris Grossman Morris Grossman, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fairfield University, died on December 12, 2012, at the age of 90. He was one of the longest-standing members of SAAP. An early meeting of the Society was held at Fairfield, and there was a reception at Morris's Fairfield apartment—an occasion on which I first met the colleagues who became my friends over the 40-plus years I have been a member myself. Morris became one of the dearest of friends. The facts of Morris's life are simple (though I would like to mention that in looking up these facts I discovered that one Morris Grossman was a well-known mobster in the early days of the twentieth century, killed in a mob hit; I think the contrast of this Morris Grossman and our colleague would have been one that amused him!). To return to our Morris, he was born in New York City and grew up in Manhattan; his dad was a physician, his mom a fluent speaker of Yiddish (a language whose music and nuances Morris always enjoyed.) Morris had a brother (recently deceased) and sister (currently residing in Pennsylvania) with whom he was very close. He continued his close family feelings with nephews and nieces, and enjoyed the warmth of this extended family—for the most part! He was educated at Stuyvesant High School, and received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His Dissertation, defended in 1960, was "Santayana as Dramatist and Dialectician: A Critical Estimate Made with the Help of Unpublished Manuscripts." This exploration of Santayana was the basis of much of Morris Grossman's later published works. As Martin Coleman has already elegantly developed Morris Grossman's views of Santayana and has gracefully summarized Morris' philosophic leitmotif: An undeniable thematic unity runs through the last forty years of Morris Grossman's work in which he explored the importance for philosophy, art, and life of preserving the tension between that which may be unified and that which is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. He examined this tension in literature, artistic performance, economics, statecraft, and human rights; in religion, drama, sculpture, philosophical methodology, biography, and human attitudes toward mortality; in the work of Gotthold Lessing, Lewis Carroll, Peirce, Tolstoy, James, Sartre, and Beardsley; and most regularly in the work of George Santayana. I shall not try to repeat Coleman's contribution. Rather I shall try to discuss Morris in other terms: contributor to American philosophy in so many ways, pianist, composer, lover of music and poetry, ironic and contrarian commentator, and extraordinarily generous friend. Let's start with his wonderful, irritating, often self-deprecating irony. In a review of Richard Smyth's Reading Peirce Reading, Morris quoted Smyth saying '"It will be recalled (Morris's italics) that Schiller's work was inspired by the failure of the French Revolution and by the great question which that failure posed to the friends of the revolution.' (p. 275) Truth to tell, it had slipped my mind!" |
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