70th Resolution

The following motion presented by the secretary, Adam Kovach, was approved by acclamation of the membership.

It is customary for the secretary of this Association to present at the end of each annual meeting a minute of thanks. Since a mere minute is but a trifling token of gratitude, as your secretary this year, I have taken the liberty of slightly modifying our practice. Before me is a list of points for your careful consideration that should take upwards of an hour for me to cover. Those of you who wish now to take a bathroom break, feed a parking meter, have a smoke or fortify yourselves with lunch should consider yourselves excused.

On second thought, I may cut my remarks somewhat short today, in case I have to make a speedy exit. You see, I anticipate certain legal difficulties if I remain in Lynchburg much longer.  Yesterday, I was so thoroughly unnerved by John Arras’ call for institutional mediation of my fundamental human right to health-related goods, that en route to the Days Inn, I stopped by a 24-hour pharmacy to rob the place, and believe me some of what I secured was very good.

So, thanks to our president, Brent Atkins, and our vice president and president elect, James Mahon, and also to the coincidentally collocated presidentially and vice presidentially shaped masses of matter. If your paper or your collocated mass’s paper was on this year’s program, convey your gratitude to the four of them. It was all their doing. My mass and I both voted for rejecting every paper read at this meeting, with the exception of some parts of the program, from the planning of which we were altogether excluded.

A very special thanks to the people of our host institution, Lynchburg College, to the faculty and the students, for their hospitality and for last night’s reception and dinner. We love the cookies you provide during breaks and we do manage to keep them down. So, you may felicitously promise to bake us more.

As you surely know, this meeting marks the 70th year of our cherished Virginia Philosophical Association, which is why at last night’s fête, the locals entertained us with repeated choruses of “Happy Birthday to You.”

Those who drank tea will remember our evening at Monte Carlo restaurant. Those who did not drink tea drank the wine of necessity seriously. We received certain edible masses of matter, which were not metaphysically identifiable, not even by a Jewish Dutch philosophical lens grinder. They were nonetheless delicious, and not, by the way, collocated with any persons, at least not immediately prior to their ingestion.

Some of us took pleasure in finding our gustatory desires rationally aligned with our judgments about Italian cuisine, although there was some befuddlement about what the devil that might have to do with our deep beliefs. Meanwhile, others continently masticated away at the victuals, secretly longing for twinkies, ding dongs, and ho hos. It was difficult to distinguish the dietetically virtuous from the merely continent, but the ever incontinent Cathal Woods gave himself away, sneaking fries and chicken nuggets from a happy meal bag artlessly concealed beneath the table.

At the banquet, it appeared that although we remain vigorous, our moral characters have scarcely improved since the founding of our organization in 1939. Patrick Goold Arrased John, our dinner speaker, about whether philosophical theories must yield precise policy implications. The evening ended Scanlonously, when Duncan Richter Anscombed with the flatware in his pockets.

One should not, however, infer that gluttony and venality are profession-specific character traits of philosophers, for situational factors are the primary determinants of our behavior at these meetings. This gives us reason to thank Lynchburg College all the more for providing a setting that kept as much as of 43% of our Association’s membership well-behaved.

I might have learned more from Chris Mayer about the possibility of training my character to withstand the bystander effect, but shortly into his talk, I looked around the room and seeing that no one else was paying attention, I stopped listening. The next thing I knew, Angie Smith morally ambushed Chris. Then Cathall morally ambushed himself. Finally, after a talk by that promising young philosopher, Matthew McCall, Duncan morally ambushed us all with a 20-page handout, and he said the unthinkable about the fuzzy and nonfuzzy parts of G. E. M. Anscombe’s penumbra.

At this point, to bring order to my remarks, I shall revert to a traditional, pre-Mahonian mode of expression that is more properly gratitude-memonic. So, I HEREBY MOVE THAT

WHEREAS, philosophers on occasion too quickly assume as metaphysically possible, an intrinsically impossible world, for instance a world containing an annual meeting of the V.P.A. at which homicidal trolley cars go unmentioned, AND

WHEREAS, it can conclusively be demonstrated that this has been the most splendid meeting of the V.P.A. during the year 2009, and this without the aid of the Principle of the Impossibility of Self Destruction, the Principle of Divine Dependence, or Spinoza’s metaphysics of individuals, AND

WHEREAS you collectively are H, and I am S, and a collection H of philosophers with more than one member takes nothing at all as obvious; therefore, Searle’s preparatory conditions go unfulfilled, yet we look forward to the promise of next year’s meeting, AND

WHEREAS, all things strive to persevere in being, except for philosophers obliged to listen to another minute of this minute of gratitude,

LET IT THEREFORE BE RESOLVED that our gratitude extends not only to the several aforementioned persons and institution, but also to whatsoever POWER it is whereby we have the good fortune to convene, converse and conduct the examined life in such excellent company.