David Foster Wallace’s “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’”
Posted by: Keir Graff
In the New York Times Magazine (“Consider the Philosopher“), James Ryerson reviews David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, which remains unpublished and largely unknown. There is, however, a reason that it may never receive wide readership, as you’ll see below:
Given his considerable intellectual gifts and large cult following, it may come as a surprise to learn that Wallace’s one formal, systematic contribution to the world of ideas was never published and remains almost completely unknown. This is his undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy — “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality” — which he submitted for a degree at Amherst College in 1985. Its obscurity is easy enough to understand. A highly specialized, 76-page work of semantics and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart. Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let ? (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs {t, w} ({time, world situation}), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a boat.
Although “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality” is not coming to bookstores soon, a commencement address that Wallace delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, “This Is Water,” will be published by Little, Brown in April 2009 (“Little, Brown Plans Wallace Book for Spring,” Publishers Weekly).
But then, as we know, commencement addresses have a much wider readership than theses.
June 28th, 2009 at 11:20 am
[...] NYTimes.com – “With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer.” (via) [...]