Imperishable Inheritance

I took a class in my fresh­man year enti­tled Great Books of Phi­los­o­phy. I was inter­ested in the topic, and it was an hon­ors class (was to be the first and last hon­ors class I took). We explored top­ics like meta­physics (ontol­ogy) with Descartes, we tack­led Util­i­tar­i­an­ism with Mill, Sto­icism with Epi­cu­rus, induc­tion with Hume, and the exis­tence of God through­out. My teacher was then, and still today, is a source of great influ­ence. His name is Dr. William Irvine, teacher of phi­los­o­phy at WSU. We talked about desires, how an instru­men­tal dif­fers from a ter­mi­nal desire and etc., because he was work­ing on a book about desire at the time (intel­lec­tu­als know what it’s like that when your mind is on some­thing, it’s all you think/talk about). Well, after get­ting the “A” I con­tin­ued to seek Dr. Irvine for coun­sel. In fact, he is the one who talked me out of major­ing in philosophy!

Well, after leav­ing he alloted me the oppor­tu­nity to read and com­ment on his book on desire. It was excit­ing to get the new set of Word doc­u­ments and read through them. I saved them in a manila enve­lope only to burn them in the end to ful­fill my promise to Dr. Irvine to not keep any copies (Perry and I did this together until quite early in the morn­ing and made a mess). I enjoyed giv­ing feed­back, and I felt like I was an inte­gral part of the process. It was the first, true, intel­lec­tual project I worked on.

He told me he would acknowl­edge me for the help and give me a copy. I kept abreast of the pub­lish­ing process, and I was excited to hear that it was picked up (I never knew, before this, the depth of work needed to get pub­lished). Well today, on my to my law class he pulled me aside to give me a copy! It’s enti­tled On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, and sure enough I’m in the acknowl­edg­ments section…(maybe I’m being silly, but this is so exciting):

“First, thanks to the stu­dents who signed up for the desire sem­i­nars I taught in the win­ter of 2001 and the win­ter of 2003; to Derek Van­hosse and Jason Phillips, who did inde­pen­dent study with me on desire; and espe­cially to Nicholas Barnard, Chris Poteet, and Sarah Kaplan, who read the man­u­script out­side of class. These stu­dents were the guinea pigs on whom I tested my work in progress.“
William B. Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

Excit­ing! Go pick up a copy. It has great insight into causal chains of desire.