OK, here’s the Joel Feinberg story I promised. I never met the man. But this made an enduring impression on me from early in my undergraduate days.
The acknowledgements of Feinberg’s books carry on a decades-long spat with one Josiah S. Carberry. This example from Freedom and Fulfillment is a particularly entertaining one:
For a variety of reasons it has become my custom to mention my former colleague, the late Josiah S. Carberry (1874-1988), in the acknowledgements for my books. As I reported at the time, Carberry died shortly before the publication of my Harmless Wrongdoing a few years ago. There would be no point in mentioning this matter again were it not for the fact that I have recently received a letter from Carberry in which he argues with his usual fanatic stubbornness that he is not dead! His argument, in my opinion, is weak and contrary to all the known evidence. It combines a misapplication of the Cartesian cogito with the kind of self-deception that characterized Carberry’s long life. Some people simply cannot bear to accept the truth about themselves.
Earlier, in Harm to Others, he had written
Philosophical helpers have been too abundant to acknowledge individually in this limited space. I hope I have remembered them all in the notes. In any event, they know who they are, and I want them all to know that I am immensely grateful for their help. My former colleague Josiah S. Carberry will claim to be among their numbers. He may even go so far as to sue me for plagiarism. Let him sue; he won’t have a chance.
In Harm to Self,
On this particular volume I received no help from Josiah S. Carberry. For that too I am grateful.
And in Harmless Wrongdoing, as mentioned above:
Finally, I must mention Professor Josiah Carberry, word of whose death has just reached me. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. On his behalf it must be said, in all fairness, that his actions were rarely as bad as his intentions.
For a time Feinberg taught at Brown, where Carberry was Professor of Psychoceramics. Carberry was something of a legend among Brown undergraduates, who sometimes took it upon themselves to publicize his activities to the wider world. But few kept up a public engagement with the specialist in cracked pots for as long as Feinberg did, though the latter had left Brown a very long time before. I found his one-sided accounts of a very long-term quarrel charming and delightful and sure proof of a very good sense of humor.
A quick citation search reveals that Carberry hasn’t published much that has been cited, but maybe that’s because it took such a long time to master new disciplines; the citations for “Carberry JS” jump from an article in classics in 1934 to one in plasma physics– with another Brown professor as lead author– in 1987. He also apparently dabbles in cultural analysis. The introduction to this book (use the “search inside the book” function using “Josiah”) is adapted from “What Killed Science Fiction,” by one Josiah S. Carberry, Professor of English, Brown University at San Diego, XXXI The Journal of Popular Culture.. But nowhere, it seems to me, has Carberry come quite so much to life as in Feinberg’s accounts of what a know-nothing old coot he was…
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