At its best, university teaching creates a power-vacuum in the student’s mind, an invitation to take full responsibility for themselves; the purest friendship is the same invitation running in both directions. These are the teachers who did that for me.
Bas van Fraassen
I have considered Bas a friend for more than a decade. I first met him in his advanced and philosophical logic classes at SFSU, around the time I was TAing for Isabelle’s logic classes. Like a good undergraduate philosophy student, I took excessive advantage of his office hours each week. Gradually, this grew into a great friendship—indeed, one of my most cherished. For years, each week, we walked his dog Zoe together; I knew her almost as long as he did. She was a meaty pit bull with no eyes, practically deaf, and, toward the end, gradually losing control of her legs. She died in the Winter of 2026. Bas and I walk Zia together each week, just as we did with Zoe.
Obviously I can say much about Bas, but in lieu of that, over time I will populate this list with some of his greater witticisms:
- “In order to have something to say about modalities in nature, as so many do, I should have to first accept that there are modalities in nature. I never got that far.”
Steven Tainer
After taking Bas’ logic courses, and independently developing an interest in contemplative practice, I found the old website for the Kira Institute, a Summer program at Princeton, of which Bas was a founding member. One of the other founding members, Steven Tainer, happened to teach weekly classes on Eastern contemplative practices in Berkeley, so I decided to start attending. Steven intrigued me because he began his career as a philosophy student, with interests in logic and analytic philosophy, but ended up becoming an advanced Buddhist teacher instead. His classes ended up occupying a major part of two years of my life, from 2014–2016.
What I especially appreciated about Steven’s teachings was that although they were primarily Buddhist (or Eastern), and indeed very advanced, he appears to care much less about the jargon and whatnot than the transmission of the actual methods and contents of contemplative practice, to anyone who is ready to receive it, and at any level. So often in spiritual teachings, progress is impeded by the desire to be spiritual, or the desire to make spiritual progress, and people end up getting ahead of themselves, e.g., in jargon, or in posture, etc. There was none of this with Steven. I would report to him, “Sometimes when I’m meditating I really want to get up and do X.” Most of the time he would say, “Yeah, you should probably go do that; that’s a thing you have to do.” Much of the time, research is one of those things. I cannot speak highly enough about Steven. Although I am busier elsewhere in my life, my thoughts return to his teachings quite frequently.
George Leonard
That is, George J. Leonard of SFSU, for whom I TAed Romanticism and Impressionism and with whom I took Humanism and Mysticism.
Jacob Needleman
I took The Concept of God with Jacob Needleman as an undergraduate at SFSU, and came back for Philosophy and Mysticism after two years of substitute teaching, Steven’s classes, and my return to SFSU for the MA in 2017. Needleman was a truly deep man: a popular writer on religion who had real philosophical depth by the institution’s own standards, a deep reader of Kant among much else. What he gave me was a very high-level understanding of the place of religion in a life and in the world—a simple and coherent vision of the major religions, which he had studied deeply, and which contextualized a great many things for me. Through friends I was, for some years, closer than most students to the circles around him. Two of his sayings, from his books or said aloud, or both:
- “The best gift you can give to a giver is to receive their gift.”
- “It is impossible not to love somebody in the moment that they are struggling for the truth.”