Paul Hoffman
Yesterday, Paul Hoffman died of a heart attack. He was a great scholar and colleague. I will miss him terribly.
At a talk on Monday, John Fischer announced his own coming talk on why immortality might not be so bad, to be given Wednesday. Howie Wettstein said from the audience, "we should all live so long". We all heard it as a joke, of course. One of Paul's last acts as a philosopher was to argue during the question period after John's talk that he saw no impossibility whatsoever in the idea of enjoying continual bliss in a never-ending embodied life.
One of the wonderful things about Paul as a colleague was his immunity to groupthink, his ability to bring to discussion a different perspective and fresh set of considerations. I always enjoyed hearing what he had to say, especially when we disagreed. Paul's forthright independence of mind was also, I suppose, what made him such an interesting historian of philosophy.