André Gallois (1945-2019) (updated)
André Norman Gallois, emeritus professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, died earlier this month.
Professor Gallois was known for his work in metaphysics (especially the metaphysics of identity), philosophy of mind, and epistemology. In addition to many articles on these topics, he authored the books The World Without, The Mind Within (Cambridge, 1996), Occasions of Identity: A Study in the Metaphysics of Identity (Oxford, 1998), and The Metaphysics of Identity (Routledge, 2016).
Professor Gallois studied philosophy at the University of Sussex and the University of Oxford, before taking up his first teaching position in 1971 at the University of Florida. He then moved to Australia, teaching initially at Monash University and then for many years at the University of Queensland. In 1997 he moved to Keele University, and then to Syracuse in 2002.
In a post about him, Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) writes: “André had firm views about what counts as philosophy that I sometimes thought too traditional. But once an issue was being analyzed, one could not imagine a gentler and more encouraging companion in shared, all-absorbing philosophical inquiry.”
You can learn more about Professor Gallois’ work here.
UPDATE (9/16/19): There is a detailed and personal obituary here.
André was a terrific philosopher and someone of great warmth and sincerity. I’ll miss him tremendously. I was his colleague for five years and I’m indebted to him. He had a down-to-earth and open personality, humorous and approachable. But what a philosophical mind! André explored lengthy and labyrinthine lines of original reasoning: as the options mounted up and André ticked them off, you were led further and further into philosophical thickets. Sometimes André would conduct two explorations simultaneously: the two explorations would somehow meet up after many twists and turns with a deeply surprising common conclusion. After I’d set out some ropey pitiful idea of my own, André would routinely announce, ‘Let me review the dialectic.’ This was the prompt for him to unstitch all my reasoning, take us back to first principles, and then finally head off in some striking new direction. Suffice to say that this was a very lengthy process. It was humbling and fascinating to talk with him. He’d such an original, penetrating mind and he was such a good friend. André was the best.