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The honor of being invited to contribute to this well-deserved Festschrift for Patrick Heelan is made more pleasurable by the occasion it affords to continue a dialogue with him that began thirty-five years ago about the relative merits of phenomenology and pragmatism. Our friendship has not been all philosophical dialogue, of course. We taught together at Fordham University and again at SUNY Stony Brook. He has been an important friend within my family since he brought comfort after the brief life of our first daughter. When our two other girls were in grade school, he would haul his definitely non-portable computer over to our house for them to play with, introducing them to the computer age when I had barely mastered an electrified typewriter. And now he exercises an avuncular superintendence over our youngest who teaches history at a neighboring university in Washington. But our philosophic dialogue has always been a crucial part of the friendship, starting in the early days at Fordham. It continued in the philosophy and religious studies departments at Stony Brook where Patrick sat in on my seminar on Peirce. For several years it was formalized around a small group of philosophers including George Wolf, a neuroscientist, Ed Casey, a phenomenologist, and David Weissman, a pragmatist, who met monthly in New York City at Jay Schulkin's apartment. Jay is a pragmatic neuroscientist.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_28

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