Our Ancestors
(For Current and future grad students with a sense of humor)
People often ask me where I come from. To whet their appetite, I respond, truthfully, that I’m French, Iranian and American, with roots and branches in 14 countries, and that my first name means “straight” in Hebrew, “immortal” in Turkish and “I’m a balloon” in Russian. Luckily, I look exactly like a straight immortal balloon….
Well, this page is not about my family story, which is very much like the One Thousand and One Nights, with adventures high in color, lunatic kings and blood-thirsty clerics, palaces, rebellion, brutal reversals of fortunes, and many happy events too! Are there ghouls, jinns and flying carpets in it? Don’t get too excited, I’m not telling that story today! This page is about something else entirely.
If you ever wondered how small the academic world is, the Academic Family Tree project will convince you that it is tiny, with a lot of inbreeding. This project and its website trace doctoral and post-doctoral mentor-mentee filiation over the centuries. To whom are you, my dear present or future students, related? The story of our illustrious academic family (that you may discover here) starts at Georgetown, in Washington DC, where I met my parents. Yeah, unlike most academics, I have two parents (called “co-advisors” in American English): my cherished Maggie Little and Madison Powers. Here they are:
Let’s start with Maggie’s genealogy. Through her, we are descendants of the founders of American pragmatism, John Dewey (worth 30 cents, as a fact/value) and William James (aka the Indiana Jones of philosophy and psychology), and therefore also related to dear uncle Charlie (Peirce). Among James’ numerous students, two stand out. Mary Calkins who was refused a doctoral degree from Harvard, despite James’ unwavering support, because she was a women, and was later elected the president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association. Another of his students was W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent African-American academic, public intellectual, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Even Teddy Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein took courses with him!
In 2020, bored out of our wits by the COVID-19 lockdown, my psychic and I contacted James’ soul to ask him a question of vital importance: “Bill, would you like to have your portrait on a US stamp, like your student John Dewey?” Here’s the faithful record of the answers we got: October 26: “Yes!”; October 28, “Yes!!!; November 4, “Yes?”; November 7, “Yes!?”; November 8, “No”; November 9, “No!”; November 16, “No!?”; November 23, “Yes”; December 7, “No”… Bill, honestly, I’m starting to doubt the cash value of these séances, yet they’re costing me a fortune!
James’ wonderful doodle in his Brazil notebook (doodling is a talent that runs in our family).
We’re also related to many American and European psychologists since Dewey studied with Stanley Hall, who studied with James and Wilhelm Wundt, the “father” of experimental psychology. James’ psychological offsprings and descendants include Edward Thorndike, and, down the road, Clark Hull, Abraham Maslow, Robert Zajonc, Howard Gardner, Amos and Barbara Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, George Ainslie, and George Loewenstein. On Wundt’s side we find Münstenberg, Külpe, Titchener, Angell, Witmer, and ill-tempered Cattell. Through Wundt’s students, we’re related to Gestalt psychologists (Wertheimer, Kofka, Köhler, Lewin) and allies (Eleanor and James Gibson) but also to the founders of cognitive psychology (Ulric Neisser, George Miller, and Jerome Bruner, the author of Possible Minds, Actual Worlds (or is it the other way round?)), as well as positive psychologist Martin Seligman (through Titchener) and flow psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, aka “He Who Cannot be Named”. Believe it or not, we’re also related to behaviorists through Angell: John B. Watson studied with him and B. F. Skinner studied with Angell’s student Walter Hunter! Last but not least, Albert Ellis, the co-founder (with Aaron Beck) of cognitive behavioral therapy, studied with a student of John Dewey, Goodwin Watson, and so did Carl Rogers. Albert was a true Woody Allen character, as the titles of some of his major works testify: A Guide to Rational Living, How To Live with a Neurotic, Sex Without Guilt, If This be Sexual Heresy, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Man-hunting, The Civilized Couple's Guide to Extramarital Adventures, and the timeless The American Sexual Tragedy…
Wundt to his doctoral students: “Gentlemen, confess to your crimes! Who broke my pendulum again?”
When I teach my annual history of psychology course in the Department of Psychology, Health and Technology, I disclose some of our family secrets, including the skeletons in our intergenerational closet (like the sinister eugenicist Lewis Terman) …
Back to philosophy: thanks to Maggie we’re related to another guy worth 30 cents: Immanuel Kant.
Hermann’s Tortoise (Testudo hermanni) seeking knowledge or vacationing in Italy (named after our ancestor, Johann Hermann from Alsace)
We’re also heirs to Leibniz. Gottfried, here’s the decisive proof that we live In the best of all possible worlds: you’re worth twice as much as Immanuel!
Wait a minute, did Christian Wolff work as a “post-doc” for Leibniz? That’s implausible: how could he afford such extravagant wigs?
The story continues on and on till we reach Copernicus (20 steps), an astronomer worth four times less than Leibniz (1 Franc and 20 centimes = 15 cents).
The East is pretty much absent from our tree till we get to Nasir al-Din Tusi (29 steps away), the 13th century Persian polymath known for his work in philosophy, logic, mathematics (especially trigonometry), astronomy (his critique of Ptolemy’s model may have influenced Copernicus), color theory, theology, medicine, recipes for making unbeatable aphrodisiacs (in his classic book The Sultan’s Sex Potions), and many other useful disciplines and inventions. Those who call him a “double-dyed traitor” because of his many political interventions under Hülegü Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, don’t realize what it meant to be a scholar before the invention of Interlibrary Loan and pirate libraries on the web: your best chance for accessing a good library was to gaze at stars, pretend you’re doing some back of the parchment math, and tell the ruler of the day, “this is an auspicious time for invading Baghad …”.
Where does our family tree end? One line ends (32 steps) in Constantinople with Anna Komnena (Ἄννα Κομνηνή), the Byzantine princess (1083 – 1153) who was a philosopher, a physician and a historian! Quite strikingly, I could not spot any woman among our direct ancestors between Anna Komnena (12th century) and Maggie Little (21 century). Multisecular sexism in academia? Don’t get me started!
What about Madison Powers’ lineage? Madison got his doctoral degree from Oxford. His dissertation readers were James Griffin and Derek Parfit; his main advisor was Joseph Raz (יוסף רז in Hebrew). Grand-pa Joe was undeniably a great philosopher, he nonetheless made a fatal mistake (from our perspective): he studied with legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart. Hart trained in law, not philosophy, so the line ends with him. Damn lawyer!
