Ted Honderich and Others

Ted Honderich and Others

Ted and I had adjacent offices at UCL. A tall man, with a corduroy suit, floppy hair, a Canadian-English accent—he was hard to miss. He had ambition, lots of it. It is fair to report that he was not held in the highest regard philosophically. When I left my office on the top floor, I would drop by Jerry Cohen’s office on the way down. Jerry was a very funny man, a great impersonator. He had a repertoire of routines. We both worked on perfecting these. The main people impersonated were Richard Wollheim, Hide Ishiguro, and Ted. I cannot reproduce for you here the flavor of Jerry’s impersonations, but they were hilarious and not flattering. For Richard I remember “I wonder if I might have a word”; for Hide “Well, I just think”; for Ted “Come come” and “We have it then that p”. During faculty meetings Jerry and I would have to stifle our laughter when these three opened their mouths. I got on with Ted well enough, but we did not see eye to eye philosophically (he had a lot of trouble understanding Leibniz’s law). After a decade I left UCL and saw little of Ted. Then I left England and saw even less of him. In 2008 the Philosophical Review asked me to review a collection of essays by him mainly about consciousness. I thought: I wonder what old Ted has to say about consciousness. I felt a twinge of collegial feeling for the old boy. I thought it might be interesting. As I read it a feeling grew in me: this is terrible. The worst thing was the lack of understanding of the current literature, combined with a pronounced tendency to denigrate anyone else in the field (a Ted tactic generally). The prose style was pretty execrable throughout. What’s a poor reviewer to do? I panned it. This had nothing to do with our past interactions; it reflected only my low opinion of the quality of the work at hand. Of course, the whole thing exploded later. Oddly enough, Ted came to accept my strictures and worked hard to circumvent them. He actually made an effort to read and understand the literature! He sought my opinion, sent me drafts. It was definitely better, though still intellectually lacking. I think I did him some good. There was less of that “We have it then that p” said on the basis of nothing but bluster. When I heard that he had died I thought of those days long ago—in Jerry’s office, of Richard and Hide (only Hide is still alive, living in Japan). Things seemed so innocent then, before the current malaise set in. We laughed a lot; not so much these days.