W. David Solomon (1944-2025)
W. David Solomon, emeritus associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has died.
Professor Solomon worked in ethics, particularly virtue ethics. At Notre Dame he was the founding director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and the Arts & Letters/Science Honors Program. A festschrift for Solomon, Beyond the Self: Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Culture was published in 2019. You can learn more about his writing here.
Solomon joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1968. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas and his undergraduate degree from Baylor University.
In an obituary, one of Solomon’s former doctoral students, Irfan Khawaja, writes:
Solomon often joked about being a “Southern guy with a Jewish name, a Baptist upbringing, and a Catholic perspective on the world”–every word of which was true. I’m none of those things, and we ended up disagreeing about a lot, especially the last part. He was an unapologetic defender of what always struck me as the most reactionary parts of Catholic doctrine. But disagreements with him were always productive. He was always eager to have them. He was never intemperate or intolerant in conversation. He was a model of candor. And even if you rejected virtually every argument, as I did, you learned something important from the exchange.
W. David Solomon died on February 26, 2025 from leukemia and esophageal cancer.
Obituaries elsewhere:
I was one of his many doctoral students, and he was an extraordinarily supportive, inspiring, and wise advisor. The 2014 conference from which the above mentioned Festschrift derived was a singular experience and remains the highlight of my academic life.
(And as a sidenote, David was born in May of 1943, not in 1944)
Since David Solomon passed away last week there are countless tributes to him on social media, in which folks praise him as a wonderful teacher, mentor, and friend. I’m grateful to be in a position to say that I know that he was all of these things, from first-hand experience. Unlike most of his former students, I never took an ethics class from David (definitely a mistake on my part). Rather, in the fall of my sophomore of year of college, back in the previous millennium, I took his “History of Modern Philosophy” class at Notre Dame, a survey for philosophy majors in which we read and discussed the canonical figures that one would expect, Descartes through Kant. It was the second philosophy class that I ever took, and it was absolutely fantastic. My first philosophy course had been (appropriately enough) Philosophy 101, Introduction to Philosophy, taught by one of David’s old cronies and longtime colleagues, Neil Delaney Sr. Delaney’s class was so good that it made me declare a philosophy major. Solomon’s class was so good that it made me decide that I wanted to go to graduate school in the subject.
At the time, Solomon was Director of Undergraduate Studies at Notre Dame, and he was always full of good advice–as so many others have emphasized, his caring and concern for you as a person always shone through.
He was fantastic with both undergraduates and graduate students. I don’t believe that anyone in the history of the Notre Dame philosophy directed more dissertations than he did. (Once in the 1980s Solomon gave a legendary graduate seminar in ethics in which he brought in four visitors—Bernard Williams, J.B. Schneewind, John McDowell, and Alan Donagan. Not bad.)
He was also one of the first non-Catholics ever hired by the Notre Dame philosophy department, in 1968. Of course, there is a certain irony there, because he ended up being one of the most vigorous advocates for preserving and strengthening Notre Dame’s Catholic character. (People who didn’t know often assumed that David was Catholic, but he was actually a non-Catholic fellow traveler, who only converted very near the end of his life, long after he had retired from the University.)
In addition to all of his many other virtues, Solomon was a great story-teller, and his life gave him lots of material. For example, some of my favorites involved him backing up Janis Joplin (!) in various honkey-tonks and bars in his native Texas, “before she hit it big.” He will be missed a lot, by many people. RIP
This is wonderful, Tom – thanks for sharing it!
I took a required Intro to Philosophy class with David Solomon my freshman year at Notre Dame, and that’s what led me to declare a major in philosophy. We read (large parts of) the Republic, Descartes’ Meditations, Ryle on Descartes’ category mistake, Kant’s Groundwork, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Nietzsche’s Genealogy. It was a fairly small class–about 25 of us, if I remember correctly. He was great at making us all see how the problems these people were grappling with mattered, and the class centered on having a conversation on what we thought about these challenging texts. It was eye-opening for me, and I’m grateful to him.
I was in that class with Tim. It had the same effect on me, moving me to change my major. Yes, he showed us that the issues mattered. Guided by him, we worked through the arguments of these texts, trying to understand them and at the same time learning how to reason about the issues ourselves. It was thrilling.
David Solomon was a supremely good human being. He was charismatic, principled, and kind.
I mostly knew him in a personal capacity, less so in a professional one. My cousin married into his family the summer after my first year at Notre Dame. And when she joined their family, he and Lou treated me as family too. You could not meet warmer or more generous people. In the decades since graduating from college, I would see David every two or three years. It was always a joy. Time with him was inspiring and rejuvenating.
I never took a class with David, and I don’t think he played a significant role in my becoming a philosopher. But I did occasionally ask him for advice. It was always practical, involving considerations about what would ultimately lead to a more fulfilling life. His sage advice convinced me to go to UCLA for grad school. Generally, he was good at helping people recognize their best paths. While at Notre Dame, I saw struggling students, grad and undergrad alike, find direction and flourish under his mentorship. And not just academically. He helped people live better lives.
The world is a little less rich without David in it.
David Solomon was my dissertation director and a one of the best human beings I’ve ever known. While most won’t know this but he was one of the most popular dissertation advisors in the history of Notre Dame. I will cite a few reasons for this (which I’m repeating from a tribute I wrote for him.)
First and foremost, he was unfailingly respectful to all his students whether or not they were one of the “stars.” It is no secret that certain students harbor greater potential than others due to a combination of talent, accomplishments, and personal qualities, and therefore attract greater attention from faculty members. One can readily observe the differentiated treatment of students by faculty members. But this was something I never saw in David. Even if he may have preferred some students over others, he didn’t show favoritism. To this day, even in private conversations, I have never heard him speak a bad word about any of his students.
Secondly, David is an excellent philosopher. He is among the most broadly read scholars that I have ever met and—like his colleague, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre—understood that doing philosophy, especially moral philosophy, is not just about crafting technical arguments or raising objections through ingenious counterexamples, but requires an integrated understanding of human life, culture, and action. The study of ethics should not be detached from our understanding of human practices since moral concepts, as MacIntyre argued, are socially embodied. We need to learn from a broad range of moral thought and talk, through reflection not only by studying the works of moral philosophers but also from artists, poets, writers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and theologians.
Treating ethics as if it’s a technical discipline akin to mathematics or physics distorts its nature as a practical, humanistic inquiry rooted in the understanding and achievement of the human good. This is another important lesson I’ve received from David: that I should keep up with contemporary research while also being immersed in the writings of Dostoyevsky, Austen, and especially, Trollope. Reading such writers deepens our understanding of human nature and broadens our grasp of moral possibilities. David also championed cross-cultural learning, recognizing the value of engaging with diverse traditions. In this regard, he was remarkably prescient—he encouraged me to study Confucianism and classical Chinese philosophy, an influence that would later become pivotal in my professional life. Doing moral philosophy in the vision of Solomon is refreshing, liberating, and humanizing.
Finally, David possessed a natural combination of charm, wit, and gregariousness that made him so fun to be around. You wanted to run into him because you knew that the conversation would quickly lead to something interesting. A master storyteller, he had a gift for transforming even the most ordinary moments into something extraordinary—woven with humor, intrigue, and a sense of adventure. To David, the world was an exciting place, alive with marvelous characters and unfolding stories. There was always something to discover, someone to meet, or a story waiting to be told.
He was a great man and I will miss him.
In addition to taking ethics with David Solomon at ND, I was among a slew of graduate student TAs for his famous “morality and modernity” course, which had an incredibly formative effect on me. I never worked with him, but I did feel that he sort of took me under his wing — he took everyone under his wing, if that’s where they wanted to be. He was a wonderful man of astounding goodness.