“Philosophers sound a lot like politicians.”
“Except that philosophers are accountable to no one. Just logic. If philosophers were obliged to appeal to an electorate, we’d all be out of a job, sir. We’re more interesting to ourselves than we are to other people.”
“But not on this particular occasion,” observed the president. “Else you wouldn’t be here now.”
“There’s not much to tell, sir.”
“But you’re a famous American philosopher, aren’t you?”
“Being an American philosopher is a little like saying you play baseball for Canada.”
“What about your family? Isn’t your mother one of the Cleveland von Dorffs?”
“Yes, sir. My father, Hans Mayer, is a German Jew who was brought up and educated in the United States and joined the diplomatic corps after college. He met and married my mother in 1905. A year or two later she inherited a family fortune based on rubber tires, which explains why I’ve always had such a smooth ride in life. I went to Groton. Then to Harvard where I studied philosophy, which was a great disappointment to my father, who’s inclined to believe that all philosophers are mad German syphilitics who think that God is dead. As a matter of fact, my whole family is inclined to the view that I’ve wasted my life.
“After college I stayed on at Harvard. Got myself a Ph. D. and won the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. So I went to Vienna, by way of Cambridge, and published a very dull book. I stayed on in Vienna and after a while took up a lectureship at the University of Berlin. After Munich I returned to Harvard and published another very dull book.”
“I read your book, Professor. One of them, anyway. On Being Empirical. I don’t pretend to understand all of it, but it seems to me that you put an awful lot of faith in science.”
“I don’t know that I’d call it faith, but I believe that if a philosopher wants to make a contribution toward the growth of human knowledge, he must be more scientific in how that knowledge is grasped. My book argues that we should take less for granted on the basis of guesswork and supposition.”