Dick was deeply tolerant and amazingly generous both in action and in spirit. When I was appointed at Princeton, he had, I think, some hopes of acquiring a colleague with whom he could discuss the more metaphysical parts of the German philosophical tradition that were near the center of his attention at that time. It must have been at least a mild disappointment to him that I had little interest in any kind of metaphysics and spent my time studying philosophers like Adorno who were of no interest to him and thinking about “social theory”—at that time a purported academic discipline that has now disappeared as completely as Davidson's. Characteristically, Dick used to say to people that my first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory, showed the uselessness of the concept of “ideology,” whereas I thought it showed the reverse. We could also find no common ground in aesthetics because of my own obsession with the philosophy of music. Dick seemed not only, as I have mentioned, to be deeply unmusical, like Freud, but he sometimes seemed even slightly irritated by the very existence of music and certainly by the thought that someone could take it sufficiently seriously to try to think about it in a sustained and systematic way. Finally, I think it puzzled him that I cleverly avoided ever giving any instruction in the university on Heidegger.
