David Enoch remembers Joseph Raz

I was not a Raz student – a well-known concept to anyone in the field. But while doing my PhD at NYU I took the subway uptown to attend the seminars by the person whose name I had heard from my very first year studying law, up at Columbia. He was extremely kind to me and generous with his time from the very beginning. We kept in touch, and a few years after my graduation we taught a seminar together at Columbia. I was young, fairly new on the field, and Joseph, of course, many orders of magnitude my senior. And yet he treated me as an equal throughout. For instance, the students had to write three papers. I graded the first group of papers, he graded the second. Then I suggested that I grade the third, because, come on, equality is nice but let’s not overdo it. He was very surprised, but at the end said “well, if you insist”. I also remember that some of the course evaluations said things like “judging just by Raz’s demeanour in class, you wouldn’t know how great and influential he is.”

While the co-teaching was great, what I remember most from this term is our one-on-one meetings (usually, at some place in the Village where, he was delighted to find out, they served excellent pizza that only had the kinds of cheese he was allowed to eat). There I received excellent comments from him on papers in different topics (in epistemology, for instance), and he was the most open-minded about critical comments I gave him.

Joseph was such a good – and sometimes merciless – philosopher, that not everyone felt comfortable engaging him head on. But my experience was totally different.

When (a few years after the Columbia seminar) we taught together a PhD crash-seminar at the Hebrew U, most of the sessions consisted in me presenting and criticizing papers by him, then him responding, then discussion. And he was wonderful throughout. Including once, when I tentatively suggested that there was a fallacy in one of his arguments. From that point on until the end of the session, whenever he referred to that argument he referred to it as “the bad argument”.

And when – after he presented a paper at a workshop in his usual, less than ideal-speaker kind of way – I told him “It’s a good thing your claim to fame doesn’t depend on your presentation skills”, he took it in the best of spirits, and laughed and laughed.

More than once it happened to me that years after talking to Joseph about something, or reading him on a topic, I finally got it – I had the feeling that he was anticipating a move it took me so much time to recreate in my own mind, he was just several steps ahead of me. So while I was not, strictly speaking, a Raz-student, one of the compliments I love most is when some people think that I was.

Professor David Enoch, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem