When other data or stronger arguments emerge, a mind must be open enough to change. It indicates that although my father may have held strong views about something at a given moment, Footnote 1 any conclusion, however sure he was of himself, was always tentative. As a scholar myself now, even that is a conversation on scientific thinking itself that he has with me through the texts. Things I discover about him that I have not known – either because it simply did not creep up into our conversations, or because it is an old view that my dad had that simply changed, and I was not present, or too young, to have known about. I have not even made a dent in the reading that is still to be done, but in every piece of writing, there is a conversation that I am having with my father, and I cherish that.
I have recently embarked on a quest of reading all his work – no mean feat, I must say. There is something immensely privileged about having had (gosh, how hard it still is to think in past tense) an academic for a father, and one who published prolifically during his career at that.
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