Crossing Paths with Paul Hoffman

My Serendipitous and Sometimes Very Brief Encounters with Some of the Most Influential Philosophers of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

I first met Paul Hoffman the summer he moved to Southern California, to take a position in the philosophy department at UC Riverside. He had just done time at Harvard. Alan Nelson and Calvin Normore had invited him to the Cartesian Circle, an early modern philosophy reading group. The group was meeting at Calvin’s place, located on the UC Irvine campus, where he was shacking up temporarily. Ken Brown and I had arrived early, and we blabbed with Calvin as he prepared the vegetarian grub.

A knock came at the door. It was Paul.

The guy was tall and handsome. Turned out that he was crazy smart, soft-spoken, and genuinely modest. A killer combo.

Ken and I interrogated Paul. We learned that he had been at Harvard and that he had held a strange sort of position, which we heard referred to as a “folding chair”. This, I think, was a position with some funding but was not tenure-track. Apparently Harvard had been hiring its early modern scholars by way of such folding chair positions. So, one would get into the weeds of teaching and doing research at Harvard, settle in, make friends, but then get the boot. Not so smart Harvard. Just saying.

At a later Cartesian Circle meeting, I was arguing with Paul, when I learned that the two scholars between whom he was sitting, Ed McCann (USC) and John Carriero (UCLA), had also been folding chair guys at Harvard. So, almost three decades of Harvard early modern philosophy sat there on Alan Nelson’s couch. Alison Simmons would in fact be the first tenure-track hire in early modern philosophy I would know of. The second would be Jeff McDonough, who was also a Cartesian Circle member (he had come to UC Irvine, I believe, with Nick Jolley, who had returned triumphant to Southern California after a rather ugly and bitterly cold year at Syracuse).

It was a small world back then.

At a typical Cartesian Circle meeting one might find oneself in the company of Paul Hoffman, Alan Nelson, Calvin Normore, Nick Jolley, Jill Buroker, Don Rutherford, Ed McCann, John Carriero, Patricia Easton, and a cadre of upstart graduate students, such as Lex Newman, Larry Nolan, Alice Sowaal, David Cunning, Ken Brown, Roger Florka, Jeff McDonough, and, of course, yours truly. There were also those who would visit if in the area, such as David Owen, Robert Sleigh, or Edwin Curley.

It was kind of the Vienna Circle of early modern philosophy.

Jill Buroker hosted a meeting up at her place in Arrowhead. I got there early, about the time that Paul arrived. The topic was Descartes’s notion of material falsity—on which my doctoral dissertation would focus. Paul and I got to chatting, and found ourselves embroiled in an intense look at Descartes’s formal/objective reality distinction. Paul had just had a paper on material falsity accepted by the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and he was hoping to run some of that by the group as a way of firming up some things before committing to the draft that would find its way into print.

Interestingly, we had both been reading some Aquinas, and Paul was wondering whether Aquinas’ way of understanding formal/objective reality had influenced Descartes’s understanding of that distinction.

A widely held reading of Descartes has it that with respect to adventitious ideas, an idea is “of” X insofar as the objective reality of the idea has its origin in the formal reality of X.

Formal reality is the kind of reality a thing possesses insofar as it is an existent or actual thing. So, the sun, insofar as it now exists, possesses formal reality. By contrast, Pegasus, insofar as he does not exist, does not possess formal reality. So, insofar as an idea exists or is now occurring, it will possess formal reality.

Objective reality, on the other had, is the kind of reality a thing possesses insofar as it represents something. On Descartes’s view, only ideas possess this kind of reality. So, insofar as an idea represents the sun, it possesses objective reality.

An idea, then, insofar as it is an occurring idea, an idea that is before the mind, it possesses formal reality. And insofar as this occurring idea represents something, the sun, say, it possesses objective reality.

The view is that the idea of the sun, that is, the idea that represents the sun, is “of” the sun (and not “of” some other object, such as the moon) because the idea’s objective reality has its origin in the formal reality of the sun. If the idea’s objective reality had its origin in the formal reality of the moon, the idea would be “of” the moon. It turns out that this also holds for innate ideas. The idea of God is “of” God precisely because the origin of the idea’s objective reality is the formal reality of God.

But not according to Paul’s new reading of Descartes.

He wondered, along the lines of Aquinas, whether the sun was what possessed both formal and objective reality. Minds simply engaged the objective reality possessed by things. When a mind did, the mind would be said to be having an idea. The idea of the sun was the mind’s actively engaging the sun’s objective reality. So, when a mind engages or encounters the objective reality of the sun, that mind would be said to have (or to be having) the idea of the sun. And, since it was the sun that possessed both formal and objective reality, when a mind encountered the objective reality of the sun, it was also encountering the very same thing that possessed formal reality—so, the mind could be said to be directly aware of the sun itself, that is, the sun that exists in the heavens, the sun that also possesses formal reality.

Paul had stumbled onto an interesting direct realist reading of Descartes.

I disagreed (and still disagree) with this reading. But I recall having a wonderfully enjoyable and stimulating discussion with Paul about it.

Ken and I once hosted the Cartesian Circle at the philosophy house at Claremont. There was a quirky, unconventional graduate student from Hawaii, a heavyweight surfer it turns out, who had made a brief appearance before the meeting got underway. Paul was there. I introduced him to Paul. I recall Paul lighting up and telling the surfer that he had plans on learning how to surf. The two hit it off, and I think that Paul and the surfer did some serious surfing.

The last time I saw Paul was at Cornell University. He was the keynote speaker of the inaugural meeting of a conference series dedicated to Princeton philosopher Margaret Wilson. I was on the bill to present a paper (Descartes and enumeration). At lunch, we sat together and chatted. It was wonderful to see him (his hair a little grayer, and, if it was possible, more striking than ever). It was a beautiful day: cool breeze, warm sun through the trees. Birds filled the air with music. I asked him how he was feeling, having learned about a year earlier that he had had a health scare. He downplayed it, but I could see in his body-language that there was still some concern.

He died suddenly a year or so later. Swimming, I think. The heart condition had caught up with him. He was only 58.

I can still hear him when I read his work, which, not surprisingly, still holds up, though I still disagree with the view (I say this as I shake my mind’s tiny fist).