On the passing of Peter Toon

In the mid 1970s I attended a week long lecture series given by Peter Toon on the right of private judgment. I purchased the transcript and toted it around for decades. Gave it to my father who read it several times. Those lectures became a permanent part of my thinking.

There was a second (unpublished) set of lectures during the evening which I also attended. I talked to Dr. Toon after one of the evening lectures for half an hour. The evening lectures were about dogma and frameworks. Toon probably didn't use the the term "framework" which is borrowed from linguistics. Nor did he used the term paradigm which was popularized by the publication of Thomas Kuhn's most quoted work. As a young man, two years short of my first serious encounter with postmodernism, the ideas presented by Peter Toon in the evening lectures would turn out to be very significant.