I dreamt last night of my late wife, Alison. I didn’t see or hear her, and I was in a mostly unfamiliar place, but her presence was unmistakable. I knew that we were somewhere in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge, where we used to live. We were dating in the dream, not yet married, and it was late, so I’d decided to go back home. For some reason, I had to go across the street to a pay phone to call an Uber. It was midnight, but paradoxically enough both bright as noon and dark enough to obscure the way. I called the Uber guy, who was hard to hear, but he said he was coming, and there the dream ended. Continue reading
Category Archives: Memorials and Obituaries
Dreams of MacIntyre
I dreamt of Alasdair MacIntyre last night. He looked exactly like his Wikipedia photo, except that he was wearing the old blue jacket he always wore when I knew him, with a grey turtleneck underneath. I was sitting down, reading or writing something about Machiavelli: it was either a philosophy conference or a bus station, I’m not sure which.
He walked in, smiling this weird Mona Lisa smile. He seemed happy to see me, or maybe just happy to be back. My first impulse was to ask him what the Afterlife Dept was doing about the genocide in Gaza or ICE, but I didn’t. It somehow seemed inappropriate to ask, like those were my obsessions, not the afterlife’s. You might as well ask a retiree to solve problems at work. Gauche. I hugged him, something that neither of us would have done in real life. I was sort of shocked: bro was ripped. For a second I wondered what part of the afterlife they’d sent him to. Did Mac get misdirected to Hell and spend the last couple of months working out in the yard? Stuff you never expect. The dream ended there. He was inscrutably silent the whole time.
Those Who Forget the Past
“Starve away.”–Randy Fine
“We must be able to will that a maxim of our action become a universal law: this is the canon of moral appraisal of action in general.” —Immanuel Kant
“The Jews, unable to leave the City, were deprived of all hope of survival. The famine became more intense and devoured whole houses and families. The roofs were covered with women and babies too weak to stand, the streets full of old men already dead. Young men and boys, swollen with hunger, haunted the squares like ghosts and fell wherever faintness overcame them. To bury their kinfolk was beyond the strength of the sick, and those who were fit shirked the task because of the number of the dead and uncertainty about their own fate; for many while burying others fell dead themselves, and many set out for their graves before their hour struck.” Continue reading
The Final Solution Is Here
I am, as I write this, sitting in a quiet air-conditioned room in a comfortable, modern library. The window to my right looks out on a bright, sunlit plaza. The plaza hosts a series of high end restaurants, each of which is set up for outdoor dining, with umbrellas to ward off the sun and heaters to keep out the chill. There are maybe a couple of dozen people out there enjoying the warmth of the evening. In observing this scene, a non sequitur of a thought occurs to me. Five thousand seven hundred miles away, a genocide is taking place. People are being starved, shot, and bombed to death with obscene abandon. The contrast is so stark as to be surreal. And yet it’s real. Continue reading
Ozzy, RIP
I just read that Ozzy Osbourne died at the age of 76. It seems a little absurd to go on about the death of an aged metal singer at a time like this, but almost any man’s death diminishes me, Ozzy’s included. So forgive me.
Ozzy was a mediocre singer, and the less said about his public persona, the better. But he was blessed to work with some great musicians, and together they wrote some immortal songs. Black Sabbath deserves a place in heaven for “War Pigs” all by itself, but “I Don’t Know,” “Over the Mountain,” “Flying High Again,” and “I Don’t Wanna Stop,” all make worthy contributions to the aesthetic education of man, and are all candidates for the musical equivalent of eternal life. Continue reading
Alfred Brendel (1931-2025)
I read a few days ago that Alfred Brendel had died at the age of 94. To be honest, I was shocked that he was so recently alive. What was a guy like that doing alive at a time like this? I can’t so much confess to any personal sense of loss as a vague sense of bewilderment that Brendel and I ever inhabited the same world. It takes effort to convince oneself that Alfred Brendel and say, Ted Cruz were members of the same biological species and historical milieu. But it turns out they were.
Continue readingAlasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)
My mentor Alasdair MacIntyre died this past Wednesday, at the age of 96. The last time I spoke to him in person was 2008, on the occasion of my dissertation defense. It had taken me seventeen years, from matriculation to defense, to finish the degree, and even at the defense itself, it was very far from clear whether I would actually finish. A minor civil war broke out within the defense over the merits of my work, but after tense negotiations, I passed. MacIntyre, amused by the fracas, described my having completed the degree as the best of the arguments for the existence of God: only a God, he said, could have ensured that Khawaja crossed the finish line. I laughed at first, but was then given pause. And that, in microcosm, describes my relationship with Alasdair MacIntyre. Continue reading
Karl Ameriks, RIP
I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.
I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading
Not a Rhetorical Question
How is it that a foreigner, Naftali Bennett, can come to the United States and suggest that Americans be blown up—yet no American has the legal right to suggest that we do the same to Naftali Bennett? I can guarantee that there would be volunteers. At least one.
You Can’t Burn Down Neapolis
Years ago, I went on a long road trip with a Palestinian friend, first to Nablus, then to Nazareth, and eventually to Haifa. Nablus wasn’t officially part of our itinerary; we just stopped there en route to Nazareth to take a bathroom break. We parked the car by the Nasr Mosque in the middle of town, and went in to use the restroom, at which point the call to prayer sounded–for dhuhr, or high noon.
“Do you want to pray?” my friend asked. “Well,” I said half-apologetically, “I’m not really a believer.” “Neither am I,” he retorted. “What I mean is, do you want to go in there and fake it?” He said it so matter-of-factly that I started laughing out loud. “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I think you’ll like it. I fake-pray all the time. It’ll be fun.” So we did. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 