Paul was a wonderful colleague and friend to me. We overlapped for a few years on the faculty when I first arrived at Princeton, although it seemed like longer, because he was still very much a presence around the department for some years after he officially retired. I didn’t know Paul personally when I showed up, although I certainly knew his papers “Mathematical Truth” and “What Numbers Could Not Be,” two of the great papers of 20th century philosophy of mathematics, along with his co-edited and co-introduced (the introduction alone is well worth the cover price) collection with Hilary Putnam, _Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings _. For decades, the latter was _the_ anthology for phil math (is it still? At any rate, it’s still in print, 60 years after the first edition appeared in 1964…).

I expected Paul to be a great philosopher, and he was. What I wasn’t expecting was how unbelievably kind he was to me, as well as to others. I arrived without tenure and was far from certain that I would be around for long, while Paul had been a central part of Princeton philosophy for many decades. But he went out of his way to make me feel welcome, both around the department and by inviting me over to his home for dinners (Paul was a great cook and once he realized how much I liked eating his steaks that was always the main course).

Paul came to Princeton as a younger than typical undergraduate in the late 1940s (!) and never left, doing his PhD here and then joining the faculty in 1960. He also served in the administration, at one point rising to the level of Provost. (Once we were walking by Princeton’s “Class of 1952 Stadium’ and he casually said: “That’s the building that my class donated to PU.”) Paul loved Princeton, although he was not oblivious to its shortcomings, either past or present. Among philosophers that I know of, only David Kaplan at UCLA has had a longer continuous association with a single department. Warren Goldfarb who just retired from Harvard had a similar career to Paul’s in this respect.

Paul used to come to my graduate seminars and participate, which I found both very flattering and very helpful. His comments were always penetrating, as one would expect, but this many years later I only remember one particular reaction. I was talking about Paul Boghossian’s book _Fear of Knowledge_, and somewhat to my surprise, I found myself defending Richard Rorty against some of Boghossian’s criticisms. My thought was that B’s criticisms were in fact decisive against the position that he attributed to Rorty, but that there was a much more attractive and defensible relativist view in the neighborhood. Benacerraf had of course been colleagues with Rorty the entire time RR had been at Princeton, and so had experienced firsthand RR’s growing alienation from and ultimate break with analytic philosophy. Afterwards Paul came up to me to tell me that the view that I had sketched was in fact Rorty’s view, and that during the seminar “the whole thing started coming back to me all over again, like a bad nightmare!”

A final thought: most people who have read some of Paul’s work have read the two papers that I mentioned above, but the other ones are worth reading as well. There are no bad or even mediocre Paul Benacerraf papers. RIP.