In the summer of 2012, a number of philosophers at British and American universities received a bulky, unmarked package in the post. It contained a 560-page book, written in English but with the Latin title Summa Metaphysica, by an amateur whose name they didn't recognise: David Birnbaum. It isn't unusual for philosophy departments to get mail from cranks, convinced they have solved the riddle of existence, but they usually send stapled print-outs, or handwritten letters; Summa Metaphysica stood out "for its size and its glossiness", says Tim Crane, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge. The book was professionally typeset. It even included endorsements from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the legendary French anthropologist, who described it as "remarkable and profound", and from the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who once collaborated with Einstein. It would later transpire that 40,000 copies were in circulation, a print run any academic philosopher might kill for. The book claimed to have sliced through countless fundamental problems in philosophy, physics and theology, and there on the spine, where the publisher's name appears, was one deeply reassuring word: "Harvard".
Then the story grew stranger. In May this year, the US-based Chronicle of Higher Education reported that prominent scholars – scientists, philosophers and theologians – had been persuaded to attend an expenses-paid "international academic conference" at Bard College, a respected institution in upstate New York, devoted to Birnbaum's work. "We are especially pleased to announce that David Birnbaum will be present during discussion," the invitations glowingly explained. They hinted that his work might point the way toward a reconciliation of science and religion. But the event itself, on Bard's leafy campus beside the Hudson river, proved disorienting. It was "definitely, absolutely the strangest conference I ever attended", the astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser told the Chronicle. Tammy Nyden, an expert on Spinoza, the great rationalist of 17th-century philosophy, "felt hesitant about the invitation to begin with", the Chronicle reported, "but because it was taking place at a venerable institution like Bard, she decided to go". On the one hand, Birnbaum's work had attracted plenty of credible endorsements: a typical blurb for Summa Metaphysica, attributed to a mathematician at Warwick University named Hugo van den Berg, described it as "unparalleled and magisterial". On the other, nothing about Birnbaum's approach was conventional. Conference-goers were surprised to find him handing out Summa Metaphysica T-shirts; it subsequently emerged that he had provided thousands of dollars of his own money to fund the gathering. Nyden recalled feeling uneasy: "Here's someone with a lot of money," she thought, "and they're buying a lot of legitimacy." full: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/19/david-birnbaum-jeweller-philosopher/print _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
