JERUSALEM (JTA) — While Mark Steiner may have been one of the most important philosophers of mathematics of the past half century, it was his warmth, humor and love of Judaism that most endeared him to his colleagues.
Steiner moved to Israel in 1977 and became the chair of the philosophy department at Hebrew University in the 1990s.
The Hebrew University professor died of COVID-19 on April 6. He was 77.
Click here to read the full article on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency website.
On the “Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog”, two of Mark Steiner’s colleagues shared a short bio and a memory.
Philosopher Charles Parsons (Harvard), who was Steiner’s colleague at Columbia in the 1970s, kindly shared the following:
Mark Steiner was American-born, I believe from New York City. He attended Columbia College. He did a Ph.D. at Princeton under Paul Benacerraf. His dissertation became the book Mathematical Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 1975). He joined the Columbia philosophy department in 1970. In 1977 he accepted a position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and remained there until his retirement. He published a significant later book, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Philosopher Curtis Franks (Notre Dame) kindly shared this remembrance of Professor Steiner:
There’s an often repeated joke in the “Torah world” that goes like this: If the Brisker Rav had gone to America and Rav Moshe Feinstein had gone to the Holy Land, neither of them would have accomplished anything. The people who tell this joke know that it’s obviously false, because the two phenomenal 20th century rabbis mentioned were so brilliant and of such exceptional character that they were destined to greatness in any circumstance. But the point that is supposed to be conveyed, the deeper truth, is that great people seem to appear just where they need to be. The style of Reb Moshe’s genius was particularly suited to his American post-war audience, just as the Brisker Rav’s very contrary style resonated precisely with the culture of Jewish Palestine.
I keep thinking of Mark Steiner in these terms. It seems almost fated that Mark would attend Columbia and study with Sydney Morgenbesser. I’m lucky to know a few philosophers from Columbia who were influenced by Morgenbesser and still refer to his insights, antics, and wit. But everyone who knew him will agree that Mark was the student who seemed to internalize Morgenbesser’s whole philosophical outlook. He didn’t just recall and quote him. He looked at problems and posed questions the same way. He didn’t just have a rich sense of humor that philosophy could trigger. Like Morgengesser, he knew how to use humor to bore into phenomena, trace their contours, and draw conclusions.
Being at Columbia also gave Mark the opportunity to study with Rabbi Menachem Gettinger. I think that Mark attributed his affinity for the thought of Yisroel Salanter to Rabbi Gettinger’s influence in his student days. And I recall how present, decades later, Rabbi Gettinger was in Mark’s thought. During the academic year he spent at Notre Dame, I had nearly daily reminders. To make a point about the inconvenience of the office space on campus, or about the difference between small towns in Indiana vs. Israel, or about what led Wittgenstein to change his mind about some aspect of mathematics, Mark would routinely draw a completely unexpected analogy with a legal ruling from a celebrated rabbi like the Chasam Sofer or, most frequently, the Chazon Ish (whose writings are the texts that I believe Mark knew the best). But nearly as often, the analogy would be with a teaching from Rabbi Gettinger. Again, Mark seemed to have been, not only taught, but formed by his teacher.
One moment sticks in my mind vividly. It was during another visit to Notre Dame, this time as an invited speaker to our annual Philosophy of Mathematics Workshop. Because Mark was speaking, the Sunday talks were all devoted to the topic of mathematical explanation. And of course, each speaker dutifully quoted, interpreted, applied, or criticized some passage from Mark’s work en route to their own thesis. Mark spoke last, and he began by explaining a Talmudic parable that I imagine was new to most of the audience. In the parable, God shows Moses a scholar named Akiva who would live centuries later and allows him to eavesdrop on that scholar’s discourses. Akiva is extracting laws and drawing conceptual distinctions based on technical nuances, deploying incredible textual ingenuity. Moses remarks to God that he is unable to understand what Akiva and his students are talking about and says, “If you have someone as great as this, why are you giving the Torah to me?” But God points out to Moses that Akiva attributes all his insights to Moses. Mark said, “I feel a bit like Moses today. One after another people come up here and talk about all these things they claim I taught, and I can hardly follow anything they say.” Was he saying that the earlier speakers had all misconstrued his work and stumbled into confusion? Was he saying that they were all his superiors and had left him far behind? Paradoxically, he was saying both. It was a classic Morgenbesser/Gettinger moment.
According to another old joke pattern, accumulating adjectives is the surest route to greatness. It must take a lot of work to become the greatest ball player, and there’s no guarantee the work will pay off anyway. On the other hand, you just need to think for a few minutes to become, say, the greatest nearsighted, vegetarian ball player in northwest Florida under the age of 12.
My own variation on this joke is that while I’m certainly not the rootinest-tootinest Jewish philosopher of mathematics and logic who also specializes in Wittgenstein, I am one of the five funniest. The competition is stiff, but Mark was the funniest. At the conference in Jerusalem on the occasion of his mandatory retirement (the only type of retirement possible for him), some of the great ones were there. Stewart Shapiro. Saul Kripke. But, of course, Mark stole the show with his impromptu closing remarks. He walked in front of the room, rehearsed a few old Sydney Morgenbesser lines and threw in, as he always did, a couple of new ones that hadn’t yet found their way onto the internet lists. He also cracked a few jokes of his own about being fired but being committed to “publishing until he perishes” all the same. And then he thanked the speakers by stepping through the highlights of the two dozen or so talks from the previous four days, one at a time, summing up the important parts of each one with a halachic analogy or joke, always with more punch and clarity than the speaker had managed. Everyone laughed and cried in turn, and we were out the door in half an hour.
He was also, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest. A memory from my graduate school days, before I’d ever met Mark, haunts me still many years later. A different senior philosophy professor saw me, and my yarkulke, at a conference, and introduced himself by saying, “I know what you’re trying to do, and the sooner you give it up the better. You can’t live in two worlds at once.” It is easy to recall this warning, when I feel that I’m compromising my Talmudic studies in order to maintain a career, or that I’m compromising my research and teaching in order to keep a schedule of prayer and study in the synagogue — to say nothing of the impact both have on family life, and vice versa. But who really lives in only one world? The person I think of is Mark. The grandfather, the father, the philosopher, the Torah scholar, the husband, the humorist. He was the greatest, not because he somehow overcame the demands all these roles placed on him, and not because the accumulation of adjectives paved the way to a cheap title. Mark was the greatest because gadlus is temimus. Because every facet of his life was active at all times, Mark made sure that no one of them could define his world, even momentarily. The uniqueness of his philosophical vision as well as the depth of his insight in Torah all derived from this.
This morning my student defended her dissertation on “The Explanatory Value of Category Theory.” Of course, she begins chapter 1 by pointing out something in Mark’s work. For so many people who met Mark, and now for many more who never did, he is there in chapter 1, just as Morgenbesser and Gettinger were for him.