Conference at Bard Leaves Scholars Scratching Their Heads
By TOM BARTLET T
DAVID BIRNBAUM believes he has unified the fields of reli- gion and science. He told me
so in an e-mail. A book he wrote,
Summa Metaphysica, Volumes I
and II, “unifies the two fields—
elegantly—and seemlessly” (sic).
In April of last year, Bard College
devoted a weeklong conference to the
role of metaphysics in science and religion, prompted by the “reflections
flowing” from Mr. Birnbaum’s books,
according to a program e-mailed to
participants from prestigious institutions including Dartmouth and
Grinnell Colleges and the University
of Oxford. “We are especially pleased
to announce that David Birnbaum
will be present during discussion,”
the program enthused.
Left unmentioned was that Mr.
Birnbaum helped pay for the con-
ference, that he has no
academic affiliation,
and that his works
are published by an
entity that he him-
self runs, called “Har-
vard Matrix” or “Har-
vard Yard Press” or, as
sometimes printed on
the spines of its books,
simply “Harvard.”
So who is David Birnbaum? Well,
he is a man with many Web sites, in-
cluding Womb1000.com, Philoso-
phy1000.com, and Potential1000.
com. He is a very successful private
jeweler to Hollywood stars who deals
in diamonds worth millions, accord-
ing to Life of Luxury, a 2004 televi-
sion show on ABC. And while not a
philosopher by training (he has an
M.B.A. from Harvard, the univer-
sity for which he named his publish-
ing operation), he is very much inter-
ested in answering
life’s big questions
and “cracking the
cosmic code.”
I skimmed the
two volumes of
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While it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how that unites religion and
science, the author does not suffer from
a lack of energy or confidence.
I learned about Mr. Birnbaum after following up on an odd post on
a philosophy blog, Leiter Reports.
It seems that a letter announcing a
book of essays on the work of David Birnbaum was mailed to roughly 2,000 philosophers around the
world. That letter stated that Garry
Hagberg, a professor of philosophy
at Bard, was a co-editor of the book.
This was news to Mr. Hagberg,
who issued a statement explaining
that he had never agreed to help edit
a book on Mr. Birnbaum’s writing. He
had agreed, mostly as a favor to a colleague, Bruce Chilton, to serve as co-chair of the conference last April, but
the writer’s metaphysics didn’t strike
Mr. Hagberg as terribly metaphysical.
“His work so far as I can see does
not (this is description, not criticism)
intersect at any point with what the
discipline of philosophy considers
to be within the field of historical
or contemporary metaphysics,” he
wrote in an e-mail to me.
Mr. Birnbaum has since promised
to stop using Mr. Hagberg’s name
in conjunction with the book proj-
ect, though in an e-mail sent to The
Chronicle it sounded more like Mr.
Birnbaum was graciously releas-
ing Mr. Hagberg from a commit-
ment, something the professor said
was not true. Mr. Hagberg called
the idea that he would endorse Mr.
Birnbaum’s writing by co-editing a
scholarly volume on it “a kind of def-
amation by implication.”
So maybe there was a misunder-
standing. There are worse things than
a mix-up over who is editing a book.
But it does seem hard to fathom
why Bard College would host a mul-tiday conference prompted by the
self-published work of an amateur
philosopher. Mr. Chilton, a professor of religion at Bard and executive
director of the college’s Institute of
Advanced Theology, organized the
conference after a chance meeting with Mr. Birnbaum. “I would
refer to his work as being, at the
very least, interesting,” he told me.
Would Mr. Birnbaum’s work have
merited a conference if he hadn’t
helped pay for it? Mr. Chilton said
yes. He declined to say how much
Mr. Birnbaum had donated, noting
that it was college policy not to release such information.
I spoke to several of the conference’s participants, including Tammy Nyden, an associate professor of
philosophy at Grinnell College, who
called the conference “so bizarre.”
She felt hesitant about the invitation
to begin with, but because it was
taking place at a venerable institution like Bard, she decided to go.
But she thought it strange that al-
most no one attended the presenta-
tions. Her brief interactions with Mr.
Birnbaum did not put her at ease:
“He keeps saying he has this unifying
principle, and it’s ‘potentiality,’ and
that’s the most sense I can make out
of anything he’s said.”
Ms. Nyden’s presentation, on the-
ology and physics in the 17th centu-
ry, did not touch on Mr. Birnbaum’s
work, and she said she found talking
with fellow presenters “delightful.”
Her impression of Mr. Birnbaum’s in-
volvement was less favorable: “Here’s
someone with a lot of money, and
they’re buying a lot of legitimacy.”
Like Ms. Nyden, Marcelo Gleiser,
a professor of physics and astrono-
my at Dartmouth College, found the
experience unusual, calling it “defi-
nitely, absolutely the strangest con-
ference I ever attended.”
He said he and other invitees had
developed a theory about the con-
ference. “What the conference was
about was trying to give credibility
to this person’s book,” he said. “We
were appalled by it because, frank-
ly, it was a lot of nonsense.”
For his part, Mr. Birnbaum be-
lieves such criticism to be evidence
of academics circling the wagons
against an outsider with threatening
ideas. In an e-mail he employed the
prose-poetry approach of his books:
