This obituary of my grad school professor Quentin Smith (1952-2020) was first published by Arc Digital Media shortly after his death. It’s no longer easily accessible anywhere else online, so I’m reprinting it here without any changes. Since last week’s essay here was the transcript of a talk I gave two weeks ago, during my first visit back to Western Michigan since I graduated from the MA program there in 2005, this seemed like a good time to revisit these memories.
The title, from T. S. Eliot, is simultaneously fitting and ill-fitting. Quentin Smith, the American philosopher, is gone. His work, notably in the philosophy of time, will go on.
I failed to meet Quentin Smith on the first Monday I spent as a graduate student in philosophy at Western Michigan University. He was teaching a seminar on metaphysics I was enrolled in. He didn’t show up on the first day of class.
I had been accepted into the program for the fall of 2003, but I was spending a lot more time organizing anti-war protests than studying during what should have been my last semester as an undergrad. So when I failed a general education requirement that any sentient being should have been able to pass, I was forced to retake the class in the fall. WMU kindly let me start my MA (and my assistantship) in January instead.
By the time I walked into that seminar room, I had been looking forward to meeting Quentin for a year and a half. In the fall of 2002, when I was working on my application to WMU, I got curious about the professors there and checked out a copy of Time, Change and Freedom from my college’s library.
Co-authored by Smith and Nathan Oaklander — who can be described, to use a word I can’t imagine coming out of Quentin’s mouth, as his philosophical “frenemy” — Time, Change and Freedom is an unusual book in a couple of ways.
First, it’s written in the form of dialogues between two philosophy majors (“Alice” and “Phil”) and two philosophy professors (“Sophia” and “Ivan”). Plenty of ancient and early modern philosophers wrote in dialogue form, of course, but it’s a slightly unusual choice for contemporary academics.
More importantly, it’s unusual because of the combination of subject matter and intended audience. It’s about bleeding edge contemporary analytic metaphysics, stuff that most people with PhDs in Philosophy know very little about, but it’s directed at students with so little background in philosophy that Quentin’s introduction takes pains to explain that what “metaphysics” means in the context of analytic philosophy has nothing to do with “‘out of body experiences,’ levitation, astral projection, telepathy, clairvoyance, reincarnation, spirit worlds, astrology, crystal healing, communion with the dead, and other such topics” that you might find in the “Metaphysics” section of a Barnes & Noble. Instead, he explains, “philosophical metaphysics [uses] logical argumentation” to investigate questions like “the basic nature of reality” and “why the universe exists,” and to the extent that science can provide us with information that’s relevant to these questions, serious philosophers are forced to make sure that their theories are at least consistent with the empirical results.
Typically of Quentin, he takes time to consider why anyone would care about such esoteric topics in the first place. To say that there’s room for reasonable people to disagree about “the basic nature of reality” would be a monumental understatement. So why, he asks, should we beat our heads against these particular philosophical walls in the first place?
The issues are so complex and difficult to resolve that it is extremely hard for us humans — fallible products of evolution that we are — to arrive at definitive and universally accepted answers to these questions. Perhaps the problem is that the human species is intelligent enough to ask metaphysical questions and to develop arguments for certain metaphysical positions, but not intelligent enough to provide definitive answers to these questions. Some may conclude from this that we should concentrate on questions that are easier to answer, such as scientific questions, but this conclusion is unworkable. It is unworkable because we cannot help but to adopt and live by various metaphysical beliefs. For example, we must live as if there is an eternal God or as if all that exists is matter and organisms that exist in time. And we must live as if we have free will or as if we are ‘fated’ to do everything we do. Metaphysics deals with the rock-bottom issues that no one can escape, unless they live their lives in a coma. The only choice is to adopt a sophisticated and well thought out metaphysical theory or to accept glib and simple-minded answers to these questions.
I very much doubt that even one out of ten thousand human beings has found metaphysical issues to be as “inescapable” as Quentin did. Many people wonder if there’s a God and some even stay up at night wondering if we have free will, but hardly anyone loses sleep over, for example, whether every internally consistent set-theoretic abstraction represents a possible mathematical structure that the physical universe might turn out to have, or whether some are so obviously fanciful that we can rule them out on the basis of philosophical intuition without waiting for science to answer the question — an issue discussed in depth in Time, Change and Freedom.
An example of this from the book is the idea that the universe will continue to exist for an infinite amount of time and then exist for a “second” infinite amount of time. That certainly sounds impossible, but it corresponds to the internally consistent mathematical abstraction of a “transfinite set of order-type omega plus omega.” Our everyday garden variety intuitive idea of “forever” clangs uncomfortably against following up “infinity” with “and then,” but does that matter if we’re asking a question not about what our silly monkey brains can easily understand but about what’s objectively true?
Even if we limit ourselves to the hilariously tiny fraction of human beings who make a living as professors of philosophy, there are surely at least two hundred or so who specialize in relatively more approachable topics, like bioethics or feminist theory or debates between utilitarians and Kantians about justice, for every one philosopher who has so much as written a paragraph about the relationship between physical possibility, transfinite set theory, and human intuition. The total number of people in the world who have done so could surely fit in a high school classroom or two without any trouble.
And most of them are nothing like Quentin.
When Quentin missed that first day of the metaphysics seminar, the graduate student who normally dug him out of his house and brought him to class said he never came to the door when she knocked. He told us later that he’d completely forgotten what day or even what month the new semester started.
At the time, I assumed this was bullshit. I thought that, for whatever reason, he hadn’t wanted to teach his class that night. The more I got to know him, though, the more plausible his story started to sound.
I think that when he did show up the following Monday, he told us about the tensed and tenseless theories of time.
According to the former, time really is passing in the way we normally perceive it to pass. The 22nd century is in the future, but one day it will be the present, and then it will recede into the past — and this is a matter of objective fact, not just human perception.
According to the tenseless theory, time is like a frozen river. You, Julius Caesar, and your future great-great grandchildren all exist in exactly the same way, and our ordinary belief that Caesar is in “the past” and the great-great grandchildren are in “the future” is just an artifact of our language. “Now” means “where you are in time” just like “here” means “where you are in space” and it’s as silly to say that Caesar has the objective property of “pastness” independent of human thought as to say that your cousin who lives in a different city has some sort of objective, stance-independent property of “over there-ness.”
Quentin was a tensed theorist. Many theorists believe that the frozen river view is entailed by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, but Quentin disagreed. His position was that Einstein was a good physicist but a bad philosopher and that he had misinterpreted the conceptual significance of his own equations when he started making sweeping pronouncements about the structure of “spacetime.”
I was never really persuaded by Quentin’s argument on this point, but I always liked his willingness to press that case, just like I admired the cheerful indifference to the reactions of respectable academics that was on display 10 years before I met him when he wrote an explosive paper arguing that many of the insights about language everyone had assumed for decades were original to Saul Kripke were really derived from Ruth Barcan Marcus.
A non-philosopher could be forgiven for assuming that the question of whether Marcus or Kripke got there first would only be of esoteric historical interest, but Quentin’s paper “Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of the New Theory of Reference” was widely taken as the approximate academic equivalent of a tourist unzipping his pants at the Louvre and pissing on one of the statues.
It wasn’t just that Kripke and Marcus were then both still alive, making this particular investigation into the (recent) history of philosophy an inherently higher-voltage affair than a paper about chains of influence between schools of thought in ancient Greece or early modern Europe; it’s that Saul Kripke is about the closest that contemporary analytic philosophy has to an icon. At the very least, it’s either him or W. V. O. Quine. (Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein aren’t quite contemporary figures; and John Rawls is too cordoned off in political-philosophy land to count.) Even as archetypally “continental” a thinker as Slavoj Žižek often speaks respectfully of Kripke’s contributions. Marcus, meanwhile, is mostly remembered for a few technical contributions to the branch of formal logic dealing with possibility and necessity, and only a few hyper-specialists could explain exactly what those contributions even were. She’s universally regarded as a brilliant philosopher but also largely treated as a footnote.
Quentin didn’t suggest that Kripke had maliciously plagiarized the ideas later published in his seminal book Naming and Necessity. If he had, he might have noted the irony that one of Kripke’s central examples in the book is about a hypothetical scenario where “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem” was stolen by Gödel from some unknown theorist named Schmidt. When people who knew nothing about Gödel except that he’d (supposedly) discovered the Incompleteness Theorem used Gödel’s name, did “Gödel” just stand for “the discoverer of the Incompleteness Theorem” as would be suggested by Russell’s theory of names as descriptions? If so, Kripke pointed out, “Gödel discovered the Incompleteness Theorem” would counterintuitively turn out to be a true sentence about Schmidt rather than a false sentence about Gödel.
What Quentin suggested in his paper, originally presented at a packed session of the American Philosophical Association’s annual conference in 1994, was not that Kripke was the hypothetical Schmidt to Marcus’s Gödel. Even more insultingly, he suggested that Kripke had heard these ideas from Marcus, failed to properly understand them at the time, and years later when he did put the pieces together he erroneously believed that he was having an original insight.
In the years after that APA session, Scott Soames and other defenders of Kripke’s honor wrote essays responding to Quentin’s interpretation of the historical evidence. Quentin responded to their responses, and so on. Whoever you believe is right, the part that interests me most is what all of this says about Quentin and his intellectual dispositions.
I attended a Marcus presentation at the APA a few years before she passed. She recounted growing up in a household with a picture of Eugene V. Debs hanging on the wall, attending elite universities, and entering a version of academic philosophy that was deeply hostile to women. Even today, this is a field where the proportions of men and women are worse than any other humanities discipline by a mile but at least everyone sees this as a problem. When Marcus was elected president of her undergraduate philosophy club, a senior faculty member told her that she shouldn’t accept the honor. After all, he reasoned, the only explanation for her winning was that the male students had voted for her out of chivalry.
If it’s true that Marcus never got her due for major contributions to philosophy, there would have been an obvious feminist angle to correcting this injustice. Quentin probably would have even won a few more friends to his cause by emphasizing that angle. But as far as I know, he never did — and I honestly doubt that the thought would have crossed his mind. As with the tensed theory of time or the relationship between physical reality and set-theoretic structures, he just wanted very badly to get it all right.
I’m not certain that the first day Quentin actually showed up to teach that 2004 seminar was devoted to theories of time, but I can vividly remember how he was dressed. He wore a couple of shirts layered on each other in what can only be described as an extremely odd way. His glasses looked like he’d slept on top of them. A board marker went flying into the air at one point when he gestured a bit too emphatically.
He’d wear suits and ties when he appeared on television, but the ties tended to look like he’d tied them while wearing a blindfold. He was far too concerned with bringing his philosophical speculations into conformity with the best available science to believe that human consciousness could exist without being linked to a physical brain, but he acted like a Cartesian cogito who could barely bother to remember that he even had a physical body.
Those suit-and-tie appearances were generally for programs where the hosts wanted to ask him about religion. The spring of 2004 was a few years before “New Atheism” really came into its own with the publication of popular-level anti-theistic books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, but Quentin had already achieved some prominence outside of academia as a very public atheist. He did public debates with some of the same Christian thinkers like William Lane Craig who would later debate Hitchens, and he was happy to answer interviewers’ questions about the problem of evil and how he could be so sure there wasn’t a God.
In one paper, he recounts staying at a cabin in the woods and hearing the screams of one animal being hunted and brutally killed by another. The basis of the paper was that, while discussions of why an omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator postulated by theists would permit apparently needless suffering tended to focus on exceptional events like war, genocide, and natural disasters, the sort of thing he’d heard happening in the woods was utterly routine. It represented the everyday biological application of what was, if indeed a creator existed, a morally evil natural law.
This dimension of his atheism was intensely felt, but much of the rest of what he wrote on the topic came from sources as abstract and esoteric as you’d expect given his overall body of work. Some of the ways he found to relate his interests in math and physics to the philosophy of religion are hard for me to wrap my mind around, but here’s a relatively straightforward example: In one paper, he argued that even if the “First Cause Argument” for the existence of God was sound, which he absolutely didn’t believe that it was, there was no reason that the big bang singularity postulated by physicists couldn’t be the uncaused cause of all subsequent physical reality. The idea that the end of the trail so painstakingly laid by theistic philosophers to the source of all things could be not Almighty God but a mindless zero-dimensional spacetime point sounds almost like a joke. A former Protestant seminarian I got to know when he went back to school to get his MA in Philosophy from WMU once joked to me that if Quentin was right about this, when referring to that spacetime point, we should capitalize the “i” in “It” the way Christians capitalize the “h” in “He.”
Quentin was certainly capable of displaying a mischievous sense of humor about these things. When that same former seminarian had his copy of a book of battling essays by Quentin and William Lane Craig autographed by both authors, Craig scrawled a quotation from the Bible with the appropriate chapter and verse above his signature. Not to be outdone, Quentin filled out his signature with a quotation from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, complete with the page number from memory.
Quentin once told me that he had a real no-kidding religious experience that lasted for hours and that he only realized it was a hallucination because the God he was experiencing only cared about him and not the other six billion people on the planet. I’m not sure if he was pulling my leg about that, but it’s entirely possible that he was telling the truth. To an extent unmatched by just about anyone else in that tiny group of people I referred to above, the ones who could easily fit in a high school classroom or two, he was entirely consumed by thinking about philosophy.
The average philosophy professor, no matter how esoteric her area of specialization, spends some time teaching and some of it writing papers about that esoteric area, but spends the rest of it watching television and having dinner with friends and worrying about the standard career-based preoccupations of any member of what’s sometimes called the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class). Quentin didn’t even have a drivers’ license. He couldn’t be bothered to learn how to work a photocopier. One night he paid me a hundred dollars to copy three articles for him from journals in the university library because the graduate student who usually helped him with these things was sick. His engagement with philosophy happened at a level of obsession that might well lend itself to having some strange trance-like “religious experience” of the kind he described.
When he was writing his book The Felt Meanings of the World, in which he grappled with the question of how to reconcile his belief that the world is a collection of particles of matter and energy that don’t reflect the will of any sort of creator with his fervent need to believe that there’s some sense in which existence is meaningful and intrinsically important, he took a sabbatical and lived — for months — in a hole that he dug for himself on a beach. Even when he was on our campus in Kalamazoo, Michigan, there was a period when he often slept in his office.
His stated belief was that eating heavy food made it harder to think, and he certainly wasn’t going to take time to cook, so yogurt you could just open up and eat formed a big part of his diet. One of the first stories I ever heard about him was about the cleaning staff at WMU refusing to touch that office. Alongside the mattress he kept there for nights when he just wanted to lie down and pass out after working on whatever project might have been dominating his life at the moment, the office was strewn with yogurt containers and books he’d long since forgotten having taken out of the library.
If it wasn’t all philosophy all the time that’s because Quentin did things like paint and write poetry — but my sense was that for him these activities all formed part of a larger whole. Analytic philosophy is often perceived as extremely dry stuff; some see it as an endless exercise in technical nit-picking disconnected from the spirit that animated much of the history of philosophy. But, if you’ll allow a little anachronism in an article about a philosopher of time, this kind of philosophy just mattered to Quentin every bit as much — and for a lot of the same reasons — that it mattered to Plato or Nietzsche or Descartes. Quentin started out in continental philosophy and had a shockingly encyclopedic recall of exactly what Heidegger had said in every section of Being and Time. He turned to analytic philosophy because he wanted to ask the same questions in a clearer and more precise way. The last thing it ever was for him was a job.
As far as I knew, he never drank, but he went to the bar with me and other graduate students on a few occasions because we liked to drink and that’s where we wanted to go to talk philosophy with him. One evening another professor in our program showed up to sit in on our class in a cheerful red-faced state of obvious drunkenness so he could heckle Quentin about the metaphysics of time. (The professor in question was a tenseless theorist.) I saw no sign whatsoever that Quentin was annoyed or offended. He seemed to enjoy the interaction.
When I talked to him once about taking LSD, though, Quentin was offended by that — not because he had any sort of moralistic objection to drug use but because he suspected me of the unforgivably stupid belief that the way psychedelics temporarily reconfigure our brain chemistry can grant users any sort of philosophical insight. Looking back on the conversation now, I’m certain that when he explained to me why the bargain basement mysticism of Timothy Leary was scientifically illiterate, he was informed not just by having read the relevant empirical literature — which of course he had — but by having experimented with this dubious path to wisdom himself at some point earlier in his life. Knowing Quentin, I don’t think he would have left any path completely untried. He may have been intellectually honest enough to acknowledge the very real possibility that “fallible products of evolution like us” can never provide “definitive answers” to those “rock-bottom” metaphysical questions he spent his life on, but the search itself was sacred to him and he would have been offended at his core by the idea of anyone whose philosophical abilities he was trying to cultivate going on a path he knew led nowhere.
In one of his oddest papers, Quentin takes up the idea that “existence” isn’t binary. Some things exist more than others. Ancient and medieval philosophers who had similar ideas generally held that God or the Form of the Good or some such thing that existed outside of space and time existed to the maximum possible degree while humans, dogs, cats, chairs, tables, and everything else that inhabited this shifting and decaying world of things had a comparatively deficient sort of existence.
Quentin flipped this idea around and combined it with this tensed theory of time. He suggested that the things that exist to the maximum degree are things that exist in the present moment. Past and future objects exist but to a lesser degree than objects that exist in the present — and even lesser as they become more distant from the present. Your great-great grandfather exists to some extent but his great-great grandfather exists much less and Caesar barely still exists at all.
Quentin died in November. I personally doubt that his idea about the degrees of existence of past and future objects has much to do with how reality actually works, but if I’m wrong about that, the time when he’s only just begun to fade into non-existence is surely exactly the right time to think about what made him so unique and valuable.
I took classes from him every semester that I was at Western Michigan, including an independent study on his book of essays co-written with William Lane Craig, a running back-and-forth of points and counterpoints, that may have been the single most rewarding class in my far too many years of higher education. I was deeply fond of him and he certainly shaped some of my excitement about philosophy.
Some students found him frustrating and I could certainly understand that. I had closer mentors later on, but Quentin was very encouraging to me, in what can only be described as an odd and occasionally unsettling way. He once told me that no matter what paper I wrote, it would be absurd not to give me an “A” in the class I was taking from him that semester — and then asked me to tell him which other students were in the same category so he could write their names down to make sure he remembered.
Certainly, and even aside from his non-optimal grading practices, he’s not anyone I’ve ever been interested in trying to emulate. I enjoy thinking about philosophy. I have very little interest in living and breathing it the way he did. Breaking apart arguments is fun but so is opening up a bottle of good single-malt scotch — or spending the day cooking Thai red curry with someone I love.
If anything, the divergence has gotten greater over the years. After I left WMU to start my PhD work elsewhere, I spent graduate school working on, if not quite the metaphysical issues he spent his time on, at least the same kind of abstract philosophical puzzles. Since then, my focus has drifted in an entirely different direction. My own little publication in Analysis happened several years ago. These days I try to put my philosophical training to political use by doing public-facing work at outlets like Jacobin, Current Affairs, and here at Arc.
Quentin could hardly have been less interested in all of that. As much as his work anticipated the anti-theist polemics of figures like Hitchens and Dawkins in some ways, he politely but firmly refused to have anything to do with student atheist groups and the like, since he correctly sensed that the sort of New Atheism that was then beginning to fade into existence was less about the pursuit of philosophical truth for its own sake than something that gave off the kind of political heat that held no appeal for him. He wasn’t angry about religion. He just thought it was one of those hypotheses about reality that we could confidently rule out, and he was passionately interested in having at least a fighting chance at being right.
He had sometimes brought up the Holocaust as an example when discussing the problem of evil, so I suppose we can say that he was on board with the most minimalistic possible political posture — opposition to fascism. Even there, though, his heart didn’t really seem to have been in it. He once told me that he didn’t understand the “hysterical” reaction to the positive mentions of Adolf Hitler in some of Heidegger’s writings. Didn’t people understand that Heidegger was making a more general argument about history and Being and that the specific political example he chose was incidental to the point? (I had a very different perspective.) To his core, Quentin was interested in decoding the true nature of the universe and doing it for its own sake.
And that’s why I feel his loss so intensely. His life path wasn’t the one I want any more than I want to be a chess grandmaster who wakes up in a cold sweat thinking about how she would respond to a new variation on the Sicilian Defense or the kind of concert pianist who literally practices until his fingers bleed, but I’m glad that all of these people exist in the world. And in particular, as someone who comes out of academic philosophy, I’m glad that he existed there.
Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who’s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia. The kind of philosophy professor who is supposed to exist, the one who responds to emails promptly and knows how to tie a tie and writes just enough articles that 10 other specialists in his tiny sub-sub area will read to jump through all the hoops of tenure and promotion but doesn’t lose enough sleep over the underlying philosophical problems to distract himself from pursuing from the PMC rat race, has some real virtues. That professor will be more responsible than Quentin seems to have been about grading. The cleaning staff won’t be overly troubled by the state of that other professor’s office. And that other professor definitely won’t miss as many classes as Quentin did through absent-minded preoccupation with actual, inner philosophical contemplation. Hell, that other professor probably gets to class 15 minutes early just in case there’s a problem with his PowerPoint.
Quentin was more like one of the rail-riding “Zen lunatics” that Jack Kerouac wrote about in his novel Dharma Bums. Or like Diogenes, the philosopher who ate in the marketplace, shat in the theater, and slept in a giant ceramic jar in the middle of Athens. Quentin was pretty much who Santayana had in mind when he said that the ideal job for a philosopher wasn’t professor of philosophy at a university but tender of umbrellas at some unfrequented museum.
Some people who share my political commitments think it’s irresponsible to pursue abstract philosophy when you could be changing the world instead. My view is that philosophy is, along with art and music and a hundred other human activities, part of what we want to change the world to free up as many people as possible to do. I want to live in a world where everyone can pursue their passions as aggressively as Quentin pursued his.
Quentin was in his late 40s when I met him and even then he was a bit of an anachronism. I strongly suspect that a 25-year-old graduate student who was as absorbed in his own thoughts as Quentin was and who had as much trouble functioning within normal academic structures as Quentin did would never make it as far as he did in the leaner and less forgiving neoliberal universities that exist now. When powerless adjuncts can be hired to do most of the work and deans are always breathing heavily somewhere in the background, looking for budgets to cut and departments to strip, it makes a little bit less sense to give out tenured positions to brilliant and messy eccentrics. And to be completely honest, Quentin might not have fit comfortably into any version of the university system, even under socialism.
But if we ever achieve the really advanced kind of socialist society envisioned by Aaron Bastani in his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism, where most of the work that was once done by humans is done by machines, and everyone reaps the rewards because the machines are collectively owned, one of the many things to look forward to will be that any Quentin Smiths born into that society won’t even need to get make-work jobs as tenders of umbrellas. If they want to wander over to a university to propose and refute speculative arguments about metaphysics, it won’t be tied to their livelihoods, and that means they won’t have to commit to trying to make it there every Monday night even when they might be too lost in thought to remember the academic calendar.
The first dialogue of Time, Change and Freedom starts with a couple lines of scene setting. Alice, Phil, Sophia, and Ivan are at a cabin “near the top of Mount Washington near the White Mountains in New Hampshire.” The four of them watch the stars come out “as dusk deepens.” Then one of them begins to speak. In a minute the four of them are arguing.
Some rabbinic sources say that dead sages continue their Talmudic studies and disputations in Heaven. My own beliefs about God, souls, and the afterlife are unfortunately much more in line with what Quentin believed than anything the Talmud holds, so I don’t actually believe that this is what happened to him, but if God does exist and He isn’t entirely unjust, he won’t punish Quentin for his lack of faith or even sit him down to tell him all the answers.
Instead, he’ll send him to some cosmic equivalent of that cabin in the mountains, put him together with a few other philosophers sharp enough to keep him interested, and let him continue the process of trying to figure it all out. He might never arrive at definitive and irrefutable answers, but at least he won’t run out of time.
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