Anti-Climacus

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Dissertation manuscript submitted. I'm preparing a long "How to Survive Your Dissertation" post, which will go up should the defense prove successful.

As I was wrapping things up, I noted with some bemusement that Duke's dissertation table makes the Acknowledgments section optional. I noted it with bemusement because, for as intensely personal as the dissertation has been, it would have been an impossible accomplishment but for the help of a large number of people. These include one of my friends and colleagues who read a 60-page paper of (very) close-text analysis and told me the five distilled points on the last two pages were the part I should build around (I did); the friends working in closely related fields who would suggest an idea or a resonance I hadn't thought of; the people who have read and edited nearly every word of the whole thing; and my advisor, who has managed to be both my biggest supporter and my toughest critic (let me tell you: no one ever wants to hear "your dissertation deserves a better conclusion than this," but it's easier to handle when you know the person who says it thinks your dissertation is very good).

Anyway, this all makes me think of the Acknowledgments section of Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice, probably the best example of its kind. It begins:

Acknowledgments and citations are a matter of distributive justice, the currency in which we pay our intellectual debts. The payment is important; indeed, there is a saying in the Talmud that when a scholar acknowledges all his sources, he brings the day of redeption a little closer. But it isn't easy to make that full acknowledgment; we are probably aware of, or unable to recognize, many of our deepest best--and so the great day is still far off. Even here, justice is unfinished and imperfect.

I agree wholeheartedly.