Talking in Rationality the other evening about my earliest explicit classroom experience with logic, having been thrown in without a figurative lifejacket as a first-year grad student and told not to sink as John Post's TA, has me in a reminiscent mood this morning.
John was the first Vandy professor I spent social time with, literally on my first evening in town. My roommate and fellow Mizzou alum already knew him, having preceded me by a year. We joined the Posts at their West Meade home at around sundown, out on the patio, not far (it turned out) from where my own future family would establish residence a decade and a half later.
I don't recall a lot of conversational details from that evening long ago, but I do remember John saying I reminded him of a recent Vandy grad who was then teaching at MTSU. (His name sounded a lot like grey fox, if I recall correctly.) I think it was probably just because we sported similar facial hair at that time, in an era when beards of any sort were still relatively rare. But it was, in retrospect, an interestingly-coincidental foreshadowing.
Fast-forward a few months to John's Metaphysics seminar, when I said something probably quite banal and John interpreted it so generously that it wound up in a footnote in his Faces of Existence.
A bit later I repaid his generosity poorly, joining a pair of fellow classmates in going to his office one afternoon and complaining that the course was a little too heavily focused on his own work. He listened and responded graciously and reasonably. I'm glad we continued to discuss non-reductive physicalism that semester, and sorry we bothered him about it.
A bit after that he invited us logic TAs to his home on a Sunday morning to finalize and report grades. Bloody Marys and Mimosas made it a memorably festive experience.
Fast-forward more years than I'd care to admit, and there's John pressing me during my PhD oral defense over my objections to the way Daniel Dennett deployed Richard Dawkins's (pre-Internet) notion of memes. I never did persuade him, but I still got his vote and his congratulations (along with those of John Lachs, Michael Hodges, John Compton, and Paul Dokecki).
A few years later my wife and I were in his living room, part of a surprise party to commemorate a milestone birthday. Or anniversary?
And then, blink of an eye, he was gone.
John attributed a strong and nurturing family, fulfilling work as a writer and teacher of philosophy, and vigorous engagement with the natural world as a climber and lover of wilderness as fundamental to his growth and wellbeing. "Wise parents gave me the support, freedom, and inspiration to follow my own interests from an early age. A happy marriage to the same woman for [53] years, two fine sons with whom I bonded deeply, and a close, lifelong relationship with my brother and only sibling provided emotional sustenance and personal stability." obit
John's death came during the pandemic, and so his memorial would be later and on Zoom. It was there that I learned from his brother of John's close association at Berkeley with Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. John housed Mario for a time, in those heady days of student-led activism, offering him sustenance and (apparently) a much-needed shower. He was on the right side of that history.
John said in a mid-90s interview that "we need to be careful that we do not buy too quickly into a strand of Western thought according to which none of the grammatical or logical features of language are there because of 'the way the world is'--the world in which we evolved." I agree. That strand can lead to a devaluing of experience, or an uncoupling of experience from rationality and a reduction of philosophy to something platitudinous and incapable of illuminating not only how the world is but how it ought to be. That would be excessively reductive, and as John said:
"It is a good thing I am a non-reductivist."
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