R.E. Ewin
30th October 1998
When I first came to Western Australia in 1970, it was because I had read Moral Notions and I wanted to work with the person who wrote it. It wasn’t that the book was of exemplary clarity: the Preface contains Julius’s example of what he describes as a typical dialogue between himself and Janet, with Janet saying “Whatever you want to say, you cannot say it like that” and Julius proceeding to apologise to the reader (with, interestingly, an American spelling of ‘apologise’) if he has sometimes had to say it like that. Julius did sometimes appear to have problems expressing himself in English. I can recall one such time when he laboured to say what he had to say and, when he finished, Paul Kovesi leant forward and said, “You know, his Hungarian’s just as bad.” I thought that very witty, and told the story many times, in Julius’s company, before I realised that it actually did offend him. After that, I told the story only when Julius was not present – it was too good a story to give up altogether. I recall another time, in these surroundings, an Immanuel Kant Fan Club dinner at which Julius was one of the speakers. It was the only IKFC dinner I can recall that was preceded by sherry, and over sherry Julius tried out on me some of the jokes he intended to use in his speech. This was Julius in his more corpulent days, and the first joke was “I stand before you as a chubby little conservative, that is to say, as a round square.” That was a reasonable sort of a joke for an Immanuel Kant Fan Club dinner. When he began his speech, though, what Julius said was “And so I stand before you as a chubby little conservative, that is to say, as a square circle,” at which I fell under the table laughing and nobody else knew what was going on.
I should say that Julius made lots of jokes deliberately, and I have never been entirely sure that the square circle incident was not a case of Julius actually playing a trick on me. He was somebody who had in his university office a box labelled “Facts” and another box labelled “Values” and, what is more, a bridge to enable one to get from facts to values, thus solving what was widely seen at the time as being one of the major problems of philosophy. He also had little stories he loved to tell. One was about Hegel and the universal spirit and the fact that, while visiting Hegel’s birthplace, Stuttgart, he saw Coca Cola advertisements and it struck him that Coca Cola is the modern universal spirit. One evening in an honours class that he and I held at my house, Julius began to tell this tale and then paused and said “Some of you have heard this story.” Then he paused again. Then he said “In fact, all of you have heard this story.” Then he paused again. Then he said “Never mind. When I was in Stuttgart . . .” That’s a tale I often tell my students when I feel the inclination to tell them some tale of mine that I have told them before, which might constitute an interesting example for something or other in formal logic since I have told them that story before, too.
And if further evidence be needed that Julius was not sententious in his approach to philosophy, it can be found in his founding of Why?, generally available again tonight after a long period in which copies of it were impossible to find.
Between Moral Notions and Values and Evaluations, all the philosophical work Julius published in his lifetime, and some that he did not publish in any formal sense, that is to say did not send to any learned journals though he did use it in class and pass copies to his colleagues, is made available to the public. If one thinks of what is required today to get tenure, for what that’s worth, let alone to create a career of note, then Julius did not publish a great deal. He didn’t feel any need to publish just for the sake of publishing.
When I read Moral Notions (at my third attempt, it might be said) and decided that I wanted to work with the person who had written it, it wasn’t the jokes that attracted me and it wasn’t the limpid prose; it was the fact that this was a mind engaging with philosophy and throwing off exciting ideas. Julius’s claim was, more or less, that he simply took these ideas from Plato (and he used to cast quite unjustified aspersions on Aristotle); I think that Julius undervalued what he did, and that it took a tremendous amount of originality to come up with the idea that that’s what Plato was saying when he talked about the forms. And I don’t know enough about Ancient Greek philosophy to intend that as a backhanded compliment to Julius’s scholarship.
Julius’s approach to philosophy, his concern with the formal elements of concepts as he explained that notion, meant that he did not deal with concepts as thought they were specimens preserved in alcohol or items that could be precisely set out on blackboards. He moved away from the idea that any concept had to be explicable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. In this, much as I hate to admit it, he was Wittgensteinian. Concepts were to be understood in terms of their functions in the lives of people. Sometimes it was the lives of people with quite special and limited interests: some concepts are of concern only to chess players and have to be explained in terms of the significance of various moves, positions, and so on in a game of chess. Readers of Moral Notions will recall the example of mistickets. Other concepts dealt with much more general features of human life, and it was amongst these that Julius located moral concepts and their function, though I don’t think he ever did satisfactorily explain in any precise way what the moral point of view is. His approach tied philosophy to the other activities of human life; it did not treat philosophy as something involving, as so much of it does seem to involve these days, technicality for the sake of technicality, turning in on itself. (It should perhaps be said that one reason for such developments, where they have occurred, might be other developments in universities, insisting on productivity in some crude sense of that term and pushing people to look for publications just for the sake of statistics to send to DEETYA or whatever DEETYA has become with the new division of Federal ministerial responsibilities.) He did philosophy as philosophers of times past had done it, not simply reading philosophy and responding to what other philosophers had said, but being concerned philosophically with problems that arose in politics, in history, in theology, in all areas of human activity and interest.
There were an enormous number of people at Julius’s funeral. He could be too acerbic at times to be loved by all, but he was loved by many. One thing I couldn’t help noticing at the funeral was that the wide range of people present reflected the wide range of Julius’s interests. And philosophy, for Julius, was not just one interest amongst others but separate from them; it tied in and was part of all those other interests.
Julius could be obscure; there is no pretending that that isn’t true. Some students would not go near his second-year classes because they knew they would not understand what was going on. Others would go even though they knew that they would not understand quite a lot of what was going on, because Julius’s engagement with philosophy was infectious. It was quite genuine and led him to spend a lot of time with students who wanted to work things out. It made him somebody who will be remembered by a lot of students as somebody who seriously affected their lives and the way they think about things. That’s not a legacy that many of us will leave.
Julius was very happy to be in Western Australia. When he became a naturalised Australian, part of the process was advertising his intention in the local newspaper. To his great delight, the newspaper made a mistake and the notice appeared in the Lost and Found column. And Julius really liked that; he felt that his travels and ending up in Western Australia really were a case of being lost and then found. He often said that he intended to give that title to the autobiography he sometimes promised to write. In the last few years of his life he was less happy about developments in universities and the effects he thought those developments would have on philosophy. He expressed the point once or twice by saying that his autobiography would have another title: Lost and Found, and Lost Again.
We never did get that autobiography. We do, though, have Values and Evaluations, and that is cause for celebration. Julius’s fears about the changes in universities and the pressures those changes will put on philosophy might well have been justified, so it is especially pleasing to launch this collection of his papers, written before those pressures though Julius would have written the papers anyway, even if not in a university. They are papers written out of a passionate interest in philosophy and in human life.
