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A Philosophy Professor's Final Class (2023)

This past spring, Richard Bernstein investigated the questions he’d been asking his whole career—about right, wrong, and what we owe one another—one last time.

You’d hear him coming down the hall, engaged in animated conversation, and then he’d stroll confidently and generously into the classroom, a small man in a black turtleneck, his sleeves rolled up, his wavy white hair swept gently back. Bernstein never coined the sort of phrase that becomes common currency outside the world of contemporary philosophy, like Arendt’s “banality of evil,” Rorty’s “linguistic turn,” or Habermas’s “communicative action.” He was, in a way, a backstage philosopher, indispensable to the play unfolding under the lights. The previous fall, he’d published a book, “ Praxis and Action,” which examines a range of philosophical approaches—that of Hegel and Marx, existentialism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy—and characterizes them all as reactions to what he called “Cartesian anxiety.” Thinkers after Descartes struggled to find an adequate basis for a meaningful life in the natural world.

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