YOU SOMETIMES DON'T APPRECIATE YOUR TEACHERS ENOUGH UNTIL THEY ARE GONE

I write these notes for those teachers whom I have had, and for those from whom I have learned, since leaving academia.

My head of Department in London, where I studied casually for an M.Phil. for three years, in the 70s, Peter Winch, a well known philosopher, used to make drip coffee by the cup, for each of us postgraduates who came to his weekly seminars, in his office, overlooking the Strand.

You have to picture a very small office indeed, seating only perhaps six people, but having a large picture window on the Strand, and overlooking the Religious monument there, at Kings.

We thought nothing much of it, really, at the time. We were, after all, prima donnas(I speak for myself). Wojtek Rappak, and Ralph Latimer were two of my friends who regularly attended, also, back then. They each had widely differing philosophical backgrounds into which I will not go, except to note that what we all shared with Professor Winch was a fascination for Wittgenstein's thinking.

Anyway, Peter Winch made coffee in this way for a year or so (lord knows how long he had had this practice).

Then one week we learned that he had had a bout of what he then called angina, and had been warned off coffee. So the coffee stopped.....

I learned recently that he ended up, some years after I had left London, here in America teaching in Illinois. Amazing things happen.

Call this just a remembrance of him.