She read all the self-help books on relationships.

The crisis in her marriage had set what had till then been mere theoretical issues, Cartesian dualisms of body and mind, physical against moral (dismissed as category mistakes by thinkers such as Gilbert Ryle, by phenomenologists, and by revisionist philosophers of mind, and neatly resolved at an academic level through a more contextualized epistemology), into sharp and agonizing relief.

LOIS BY CORA CRUZ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 30

Lois Mandelbaum had frizzy hair. The paper she read at the seminar was brilliant. In the clearest possible language, without a trace of pretension or jargon, she led the class through every detail and nuance of Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment: reviewing and intertwining his versions of reason and morality throughout, you felt you were being led by the hand of the gentlest kindergarten teacher through the thorniest labyrinth of conceptual obfuscation. The structure remained immense, intimidatingly complex and intricate, but the guide was so down to ear…