DALL·E 2024-02-20 12.18.47 - An elderly woman, dressed in a blend of traditional 19th-century mourning attire and modern clothing, stands alone in a bustling cityscape of the year.jpg

Did you ever muse about odd things that have a good chance of possibility? Here is an interesting thought:

Could someone still be collecting a Civil War widow's pensiom?

In 1865, a 14-year-old boy becomes a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War. In 1931, at age 90, he marries an 18-year-old woman, who continues to collect his Civil War pension after he dies. Today, in early 2024, she is one hundred and ten years old, still collecting that pension.

I was inspired to this thought by reflecting about some long-dead people my father knew, who survive in my memory through his stories. How far back might such second-hand memories go? Farther than one might initially suppose -- in principle, back to the 1860s. An elderly philosopher, alive today, might easily have second-hand memories of William James (d. 1910) or Nietzsche (d. 1900), maybe even Karl Marx (d. 1883) or John Stuart Mill (d. 1873).

Second-hand memories have a quality to them that third-hand memories and historical accounts lack. Through my father's and uncle's stories, I feel a kind of personal connection to Timothy Leary (d. 1996), B.F. Skinner (d. 1990), and Abraham Maslow (d. 1970), even though I never met them, in a way I don't to other scholars of the era. It hasn't been so long since their heyday in the 1950s - 1960s, when my father and his brother knew them -- but I might still have several decades in me. My son David, currently a Cognitive Science PhD student at Institut Jean Nicod at ENS in Paris, has also heard such stories, and he could potentially live to see the 22nd century. (My daughter Kate was too young when my father died to have made much of his academic stories.)

The idea that the U.S. might still be paying a Civil War widow's pension is not as ridiculous as it seems. According to this website, the last pension-recieving Union widow died in 2003. According to this website, it was 2008. The last recipient of a Civil War children's benefit died from a hip injury in 2020.

Eric Schwitzgebel  - http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/02/could-someone-still-be-collecting-civil.html