O. K. Bouwsma
ABSTRACT
O.K. Bouwsma taught philosophy for over fifty years in the middle part of this century. He influenced scores of students and colleagues with his unique Socratic style of drawing clarity out of his interlocutors. From the 1930`s through the 1970`s, Bouwsma learned and applied the skills of exposing nonsense and presenting sense in connection with philosophical theories. These skills he acquired from a continual reading of Wittgenstein. But Bouwsma`s written and spoken practice of philosophy did not take the form of a Wittgenstein scholar. The form, rather, was that of his applying acquired skills to the sentences of other philosophers. In short, he taught the art of reading and listening to the sentences of philosophers. In this he compared himself to Socrates who helped others give birth but was himself barren. His reading of others, Descartes and Berkeley for example, took the form of providing ordinary language surroundings for their sentences -- trying and failing to understand them. It also took the form of examining analogies which draw a philosopher into the expanded theory.
Bouwsma also practiced a special version of his art of reading in connection with philosophers` puzzles about religious concepts. In this case the art involved using the language of the Scriptures as the ordinary language which could provide the sense for the religious concept. This practice he acquired from a life-time of attention to understanding Christianity and, particularly, through reading Soren Kierkegaard.
In this book, I try to present these philosophical understandings of O.K. Bouwsma, primarily through his published essays, but also through his notebooks. I begin with a memoir of my acquaintance with him over a fifteen year period. In this, I work especially at presenting him as a unique teacher.