AGHAST

Too young to be drafted into the Second World War, Bernstein enrolled as an undergraduate in the University of Chicago, where he fell in love with philosophy, eventually writing an honors thesis entitled “Love and Friendship in Plato: A Study of the Lysis and the Phaedrus”. His classmates included Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Mike Nichols, George Steiner, and the person who would become one of Bernstein's closest friends and philosophical interlocutors, Richard Rorty. Upon graduation, and partly because he needed more credits to begin graduate studies, Bernstein returned to New York City for a couple of years to study at Columbia University where he took courses on a variety of subjects, ranging from ancient Greek to book binding, and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree, graduating summa cum laude. In 1953, following Rorty's advice, he went to Yale University to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, writing a dissertation on John Dewey's Metaphysics of Experience

Among his accomplishments there were a 1983 conference celebrating the quincentenary of Raphael's birth. The conference, organized together with Marcia B. Hall, focused on the subject of science in the service of art history. It was there that Shearman also announced a project to revise Vincenzo Golzio's Raffaello nei documenti, 1971, a classic of text of art history. Though the briefcase containing most of his archival transcriptions had been stolen the previous year, Shearman painstakingly repeated his research. That same year, 1983, his first wife, Jane Dalrymple Smith (Shearman), died.