I was looking for a sharp flat stone to skip into the waves, hoping for a sign, some perfect stone that might skip seven or eight times out to sea.Ī magic pebble. One of the kids in our crew was fully clothed and trying to climb onto a giant rock in the break, her tiny body washed backwards in a spray of water with each attempt. There weren’t many other people around except my family and our friends. But here I was on a perfectly uniform stretch of rocks rolling right into the waves. Other beaches on the island are covered in sea grass and yellow sand. How lucky to find a beach of stones on July 5. Dick’s work was focused around putting thinkers from disparate times and traditions into conversation, and he facilitated those dialogues in real life as well as on the page. He knew Derrida, Gadamer, Habermas, and a host of others. He was close friends with Richard Rorty, who was his classmate at the University of Chicago, and later with Hannah Arendt, with whom he taught at The New School and whose work he wrote about in his 2018 book, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now. Before that, he taught at Haverford College, and earlier still, at Yale University, where he was infamously denied tenure in a landmark case that sparked student protests and led to reforms in the tenure procedures.Įverywhere he went, he was in conversation with the leading philosophical figures of his time. Bernstein, had died the day before on the Fourth of July.ĭick (as he was known) taught at The New School since 1989, the same year he served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and delivered a keynote address entitled “Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds.” I was only fourteen at the time, unaware of Dick but reading Nietzsche in the library of my public high school. My former teacher, mentor, and dissertation advisor at The New School for Social Research, Richard J. I found a flat black rock and used another one to etch the initials “R.J.B.” onto the surface. I tried half-heartedly to build a cairn, stacking five or six stones until they toppled. The beach was covered in smooth stones, and the waves were crashing with force, the waters spilling up over the rocks and retreating with the sound of a million stones clacking against one another. I was sitting on Black Rock Beach on Block Island recently, having climbed down a slippery trail holding onto an old piece of rope.
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