 Newton Garver was born in Buffalo NY, returning in 1961 to teach Philosophy at the University of Buffalo. There he rose through the ranks, becoming Distinguished Service Professor in 1991. At UB he chaired the Faculty Senate, published respectably, and traveled and lectured extensively. Now retired from active teaching, he lives nearby in a country house built by his grandparents, together with Anneliese Garver, his wife of 50 years. He continues to write and to give occasional lectures, but is more occupied with upkeep of the land and with various Quaker activities.
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Submitted by Newton on Mon, 04/29/2013 - 07:44.
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2013-04-27
I give thanks for many wonderful greetings and congratulations on my 85th birthday. The 24th was not only the end of 85 years but also the end of 30 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) sessions, each of which took nearly four hours out of the day – the latest of a long series of medical assaults that began in February 2012:
2/12 -- ambulatory surgery to remove what was thought to be a cyst
3/12 – 9-day hospitalization following auto accident
4/12 – powerful chemo to reduce tumor (former “cyst”)
Submitted by Newton on Wed, 09/19/2012 - 11:58.
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The 1960s wer years of violene is the USA, inlcuding a Presidential assassination and war-like suppression of riots in many cities. My essay "What Violence Is" was published near the end of the decade in an attempt to clarify and relate to one another varoious aspects or kinds of violence. It has been reprinted vary many times in various anthologies, and I believe that nothing I have written has been read by so many people. More people have praised it as "discussble" than as true, but its basic categories have entered into current discussions of violence.
Submitted by Newton on Fri, 03/23/2012 - 08:30.
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Derrida and Wittgenstein – Again
These remarks were written as my contribution to the second Korean edition of the volume I wrote with Seung Chong Lee. Their starting point is reviews of the first edition of our work, which leads naturally into consideration of some general themes, especially about the relation of literary criticism and philosophy. Even the most partisan of the reviews has something valuable to consider, and the issues that arise are not merely nit-picking. One of the prominent features post-modernism was skepticism (or denial) of a distinction between the two domains, whereas our work insists on such a distinction. The second Korean edition appeared in 2010, but these remarks have not been published in English.
Submitted by Newton on Sat, 11/26/2011 - 19:48.
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Friends seem generally in denial about our long-standing war against nature. The chief human accomplishment in this war has been the explosion of the human population. When I was born, no human had lived through a doubling of the human population. In my lifetime it has more than tripled, and I could still live to see it quadruple. All that growth has been at the expense of nature, that is, at the expense of other creatures and features of the natural world. How has that happened?
My extended thoughts about this dilemma were published in the November 2011 issue of SPARK, and are attached.
Submitted by Newton on Tue, 09/06/2011 - 06:40.
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Last year Evo Morales Ayma, president of Bolivia since 2006 and the first indigenous Amerindian elected president of any country in South America, published a volume containing his messages on economic and environmental policies. It contains highly challenging ideas, often deliberately confronting those of the United States. Some of what he says is political hype and some of it seems out of touch with scientific thinking. But the same can be said for most of what US politicians have to say about those matters, and some of what he says invokes deep moral principles. The shame is that Evo Morales has been ignored by the US media, although his ideas deserve thoughtful discussion. I have made some notes from his book, which are attached. Although I have occasionally paraphrased in my own words [in square brackets], most of the notes are direct quotations.
Submitted by Newton on Tue, 09/06/2011 - 06:36.
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Kwame Anthony Appiah has just published a new book, The Honor Code, which gives me occasion to recall both my connection with him and his connection with Fred Irvine, an old Quaker friend of mine and one of the distinguished Quaker scientists of the 20th century.
Submitted by Newton on Thu, 07/14/2011 - 07:27.
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This little vignette is what I remember rather than documented history. Even if others remember it differently, it is a good story. I have given New YorkYearly Meeting permission to publish it, but I do not know when or in what venue that might happen. Next year is the centennial of Bayard’s birth, and the following year the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, so there are plenty of coming occasions to hear about him.
Submitted by Newton on Thu, 04/21/2011 - 17:50.
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Iris Murdoch holds that proper attention both reduces choices and increases freedom. Wow! When we get our minds around that inspired thought, we will have put some distance between ourselves and the stultifying dogmas of our outcome-oriented civilization.
Paying proper attention, which is especially important with respect to other people, means appreciating the inherent reality of what we are attending to. Simone Weil took mathematics or formal logic to be good training for paying proper attention, because it is so difficult in these fields to hide reality under hopes or desires. Seeing other people as they really are is much more difficult than seeing mathematical reality.
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