Life
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Gert studied philosophy at Cornell University. He was a professor at Dartmouth College for fifty years, from 1959-2009. Upon his death in 2011, he was the Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Emeritus at Dartmouth. He also had other adjunct and visiting appointments, including being a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. He died in 2011 in North Carolina.
A source of notoriety among his contemporaries was that his family became a family of philosophers: his two children, Joshua and Heather, both became philosophers, and both married two other philosophers.
Read more about this topic: Bernard Gert
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Look at your [English] ladies of quality—are they not forever parting with their husbands—forfeiting their reputations—and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls—who have politeness, sense and conversation—but these are few—and then look at your trademen’s daughters—what are they?—poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life . . .”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)