On Tuesday, March 22 I met with Shihao Gong, a fellow PhD student from Keele, also supervised by Sorin Baiasu. I always enjoy my meetings with Shihao, and this one came with some suspense. Shihao had written to me five days before: “Please let me know when you will be on campus.”
I arrived at the Café at the Chancellor’s building, where Shihao was waiting for me, with coffee and some Kant-themed books on the table. I first learned of Shihao’s engagement with Kantian philosophy when we both participated in the ECPR Winter School on ‘Kantian Thought Today: War and Other Global Challenges’ in 2022 (co-organized by the Kantian Standing Group and the KOSAK,) which is where the story he was about to tell me begins.
Shihao had borrowed from the Keele Library the first book that I saw on the table, Mary J. Gregor’s English translation of Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals, to prepare for the Winter School.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals. Introduction, translation, and notes by Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Around November 2022, while reading this copy, Shihao found a surprising bookmark: a letter that Stephan Körner wrote in 1966 to a relatively young Graham Bird—who would end up founding the UK Kant Society 28 years later—about reviewing a book by Lewis White Beck.
PROFESSOR: S. KÖRNER, M.A., PH.D.
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, THE UNIVERSITY, BRISTOL 8
19th January, 1966
G.H. Bird Esq.,
Department of Philosophy,
St. Andrews University,
Scotland.
Dear Bird, (I hope that we can dispense with titles in addressing each other)
I am very pleased to hear that you are prepared to review Beck’s book. I don’t need the review in a hurry.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
[handwritten signature]
P.S. I enclose the book.
In our conversation, Shihao told me of his surprise at reading this letter: Körner’s Kant (1955) had been his first introduction to Kantian philosophy!
Körner, Stephan, Kant. Pelican Books, 1955; reprinted in Penguin Books 1990.
Together (and assisted by a popular search engine,) Shihao and I speculated about which of Lewis White Beck’s books Stephan Körner was sending to Graham Bird. We were not able to find a review written by Graham Bird of any of Lewis White Beck’s books, and we settled on the conjecture that it was Studies in the Philosophy of Kant (1965). Yet, the review, if it existed at all, was absent from Graham Bird’s CV, addended to the preprint of Kenneth R. Westphal’s Memorial Notice for Graham Bird’s passing away in 2021.
Later that day, seeking other reviews by Graham Bird, I only found one from April of 1966 (the year the letter was written; incidentally, this review is also missing from Graham Bird’s CV,) in the section “New Books” of Mind (New Series, Vol. 75, No. 298, pp. 293-308.) Yet, this review is not of a book of Lewis White Beck’s, but rather of Mary J. Gregor’s 1963 study on Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, called Laws of Freedom: A Study of Kant’s Method of Applying the Categorical Imperative in the Metaphysik der Sitten (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
The inquiries had full-circled back to Mary J. Gregor. Was this just chance? Did Stephan Körner’s expression “Beck’s book” not mean “The book that Lewis White Beck wrote”, but rather something like “The [Mary J. Gregor] book that Lewis White Beck recommended for review”?
4. Mary J. Gregor
After equal portions of research and speculation, I conjectured that Graham Bird had never gotten around to writing the review. I tried reaching out to family members of this older generation of Kant scholars, seeking some insights into their lives and personalities. After learning that Colin Bird, Graham Bird’s son, is on annual leave and will not be attending his institutional email, I got in touch with Stephan and Edith Körner’s son, who goes by Tom Korner and is a mathematics professor at Cambridge. On his website, Korner’s Korner (which is full of fun and witty remarks,) after giving out his email address, Tom Korner smartly writes “My favourite e-mail ends with the words ‘this message needs no reply’.”
Nonetheless, I concluded my email by asking him a few questions: Was there anything about his father’s letter that caught his eye? Was there anything in it that exemplified his father’s personality? Was he influenced by his father’s research? Did he know any of his father’s Kantian colleagues? Or maybe could he maybe share a vaguely-related anecdote?
He answered:
Dear Mr [Sancho] Adamson,
Thank you for this. For some time, my father
was editor for the journal Ratio which then appeared
both in German and English. I remember him saying
that this was a great advantage since, if an article
could not be translated into a closely related
languange, this was good indication that the
argument lacked universality.
With best wishes
Tom Korner
Shihao and I both found this thought about translation across languages to be quite amusing, but it also turned out to be a great hint to continue the search for Graham Bird’s review. Stephan Körner might have been asking Graham Bird to review a book by Lewis White Beck in the context of a journal publication for Ratio, the journal to which he was an editor of Ratio for nineteen years between 1961 and 1980.
Yet, after the original Ratio series ended in 1987, in 1988 the journal was reborn into its second series. In other words, what we now know as Ratio is a very different journal from the Stephan Körner times, meaning that publications from the original series were never indexed nor published online. In an exchange with the current editor of Ratio, David S. Oderberg, he put it in these terms: “I’d have trouble finding issues from the 1960s! I can try our library, but don’t get your hopes up.”
Six days later, David S. Oderberg got back in touch with me with good news. Attached was Graham Bird’s review “Lewis White Beck: Studies in the Philosophy of Kant. (Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1965. Pp. viii+242. $6.5.)” in: Ratio, Vol. X (Num. 1), pp. 88-92, June 1968.
After reading it, I found it to be a wonderfully unflattering five-page account of Lewis White Beck’s book. Although the severity of his criticisms is attenuated by the review’s closing words, there is something exciting and refreshing in reading a relatively young Graham Bird scrutinizing the writings of one of the established authorities of his time.
Page 92 of the review.
It strikes me that this older generation of Kant scholars is in many ways historically close to current Kant scholarship. For one, it is just roughly 50 years apart (just one-fiftieth of the twenty-five century time span of the history of philosophy,) and much of current Kant scholarship is a direct continuation of their restitution of Kant in English-speaking academic philosophy. Yet, at the same time, it is a clearly distinct generation. In the vein of Stephan Körner, this time capsule into another period of Kant scholars has made me raise questions about how much is lost and how much is conserved when translating thoughts across generations, as well as questions about the universality of such thoughts. I still have no clear answers, but one thing is certain. When it comes to serving as a bookmark, paper letters will always be superior to emails.
Eric Sancho Adamson, April 4, 2023.
I thank Shihao Gong and Sorin Baiasu for making this story possible. Shihao found the letter in the first place, and Sorin suggested that we look into it together for a blog post. I thank Tom Korner and David S. Oderberg for their good-hearted replies, which have both turned out to be helpful in more ways than one. Last but not least, I wish to thank Sally Sedgwick for kindly granting me permission to use the photograph of Graham Bird in this post.
Sources of images:
- Stephan Körner. (2023, March 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan_K%C3%B6rner
- Graham Bird in 2017. Copyright and courtesy of Sally Sedgwick.
- Lewis White Beck, cropped from: https://www.pdcnet.org/apapa/content/apapa_2013_0068_0068_216
- Mary Gregor: https://digital.sdsu.edu/view-item?i=134745
The Keele-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian Research Centre 