SEMPITERNA REQUIES

 John M. Dolan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, died September 14 after a courageous battle with cancer that lasted nearly ten years. He was 68 years old.

John was born in New York City in 1937. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and philosophy at Brooklyn College in 1959. (While earning his degree, he also worked full-time for three years on the Brooklyn waterfront as a member of the International Longshoreman's Union.) He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University in 1969; his thesis was “Translation and Meaning: An Examination of Quine’s Translational Indeterminacy Hypothesis.” His supervisor was the late Donald Davidson.

He was co-founder (with Dr. Hymie Gordon, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic) of the Program in Human Rights and Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health at the University of Minnesota. He held the Morse-Amoco Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Teaching and was a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. The John M. Dolan Professorship of Philosophy was endowed in his honor by a grateful and highly successful student, Asher Waldfogel, the founder of Redback Networks, Inc. The endowment provides research funds for a faculty member.

Before joining the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1971, Professor Dolan held positions in teaching (of mathematics, computer science, and philosophy) and in research (into computational linguistics, meteorology, and philosophy) at Brooklyn College, MIT, the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller University, and Swarthmore College. He served for three years as associate editor of the MIT journal Computational Linguistics and Mechanical Translation and for seven years as co-editor of The Thoreau Quarterly. He was a member of the American Philosophical Association. He was one of the few non-Japanese scholars in the Thoreau Society of Japan. He taught medical ethics at the Mayo Medical School; he taught and served as course director for courses in medical ethics at the Medical School of the University of Minnesota. He was a force in creating the series of talks by distinguished speakers for the Program in Human Rights and Medicine. The list of speakers is at a link at the Program’s website, at http://www1.umn.edu/phrm/index.html. Until his medical-related retirement, he occasionally taught a course in medical ethics, “Our Obligations toward Various Forms of Life,” in the University of Minnesota's Law School. His publications include a logic book, Inference and Imagination (Archimedean Point Press, 1994), and articles on medical ethics, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, media studies, pedagogy, and epistemology in various medical, legal, and other scholarly journals. Two publications that particularly represent his intense convictions are, “Is Physician Assisted Suicide Possible?”, Duquesne Law Review 35 (1996) and “Death by Deliberate Dehydration and Starvation: Silent Echoes of the Hungerhäuser,” Issues in Law and Medicine 7 (1991). He gave invited lectures at medical schools, hospitals, colleges, universities, and scholarly conferences throughout the United States, including Abbott Northwestern Hospital, Brandeis University, the medical school of the University of California, Davis, the philosophy department of the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Sonoma, the University of Chicago, the City University of New York, Columbia University, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Maryland, the medical school of the Mayo Clinic, MIT, the medical school of New York University, the philosophy department of New York University, St. Olaf College, the University of St. Thomas, the medical school of Stanford University, the philosophy department of Stanford University, the University of Southern California, Swarthmore College, and the University of Washington. He gave the Inaugural Address, “On Stewardship,” at the Chuo Research Institute for Global Environment at Chuo University in Japan.

Some of his success as an inspiring teacher must be credited to his entirely unearned qualities of imposing physical presence and voice, lightning-quick wit, and a talent for impersonation that was equal to that of the best stand-up comedians. But most of that success came from the dedicated effort he gave to his teaching, his genuine appreciation of his students, and his deep feeling that teaching was a solemn responsibility. In one of his essays, “On Learning to Teach,” he asks for “respect for the intelligence and unfathomability of your student, a strong sense of his possibilities for growth.” Included below is a statement of his approach to teaching that he wrote at the invitation of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2000.

The academic appointment in which he took most pride, he liked to say, is the position he held as Headmaster of “Kenwood Academy,” the home school he and his wife conducted for their children from 1975 until 1993.

He is survived by his wife Rosemarie, daughter Elizabeth Geach, son Sean, daughter Emily, and four grandchildren.

Sandra Peterson

John M. Dolan Professor of Philosophy

An Approach to Teaching

John M. Dolan 

Universities now find among their incoming students a number who are disillusioned, cynical, and only marginally literate (to continue the opening metaphor: fish which haven’t been near water for some time), but these forlorn students possess human powers (however embryonic) indistinguishable in kind from those which created the treasures of thought and art of the world’s civilizations. The powers lying dormant in these students await occasions that stir them into life. A “teacher” speaking with enthusiasm, knowledge, and love about some important subject can sometimes create such occasions. But an instructor with proper reverence for the mysteries of learning and intellectual growth will be reluctant to accept the label “teacher” and will refuse to take credit for the growth the student ultimately achieves. A plant springs and prevails through its own inner force. The role of external stimuli matters less than the plant’s inner constitution.

In the meantime I am conscious that all writing, and especially all philosophical writing, is rewriting, and, accordingly, attempt to give my students plenty of opportunity to rewrite the papers they are assigned. When teaching logic at the undergraduate level, I arrange many hours of weekly “workshops” (most led by undergraduates who have demonstrated particular love of the subject) which give the students an opportunity to work together on problems and explore the subject in the presence of someone already at home in it.

Further, in a country in which roughly five percent of all illness is iatrogenic (caused by physicians), I try to bear in mind that doctors are not the only professionals who may inflict damage as they carry out their work. Teachers, like doctors, can do considerable harm if they are careless. Commonplace examples of pedagogic injury at the university level are provided by courses in which students are asked to read twenty serious books in the space of a short term (and thereby led into mandatory thoughtlessness) or courses in which they are told that the line between truth and falsehood is an arbitrary social construction and that traditional discriminations among works of literature or art are merely reflections of group interests and political power. At the level of elementary education, equally harrowing examples abound. Teachers could take a hint from doctors, and adopt the rule: “Primum non nocere” (first do no harm). The measurement of stupidity is no doubt as problematic as the measurement of intelligence; nonetheless, the amount of stupidity in this country caused by schools and teachers probably exceeds five percent of the total. We might term such stupidity “magistrogenic stupidity.” The circumstance that our language doesn’t label the phenomenon is evidence that the risk of producing magistrogenic stupidity may be generally neglected.

Finally, given that so little is known about learning and the growth of knowledge, any of us who accept the role of instructor might profit from Aristotle’s remark that “Those who work with pleasure always work with more discernment and greater accuracy.”

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