Take me out with the crowd

The philosopher Joseph S. Ullian died late last year. He is probably best-known for an introduction to epistemology co-authored with W. V. Quine, that is very much of its time. But what caught my eye in the obits was his reputation as a baseball fanatic. In this, he joins a noble pantheon, from Quine’s Harvard colleague John Rawls, to Ted Cohen and Alva Noë—both of whom, like Ullian, earned Harvard PhDs.

The name was familiar to me for another reason. Years ago, indulging in the guilty pleasure of mean reviews, I began with Ullian’s evisceration of Paul Weiss:

[Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry] is a tedious, pompous, ill-written book fairly glutted with examples of essentialist philosophy at its worst. … Weiss shuns almost totally the rich lore of the sports world and misses all of that world's magic. Instead he trades unrestrainedly in abstractions and generalizations, as if goaded by a hatred of relevance.

This excerpt understates the case: Ullian quotes passages from Weiss that are overtl…