David Charles, professor emeritus of philosophy at Yale University, has died.
Professor Charles was well-known for his work in ancient philosophy, and especially on Aristotle. He is the author of The Undivided Self (2021), Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (2000), Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (1984), among other works, which you can learn more about here.
Professor Charles joined the faculty at Yale in 2014. Before that, he was at the University of Oxford. After retiring from Yale he was a visiting professor at Stanford University. He earned his D.Phil. from Oxford.
He died on August 12th.
(via Victor Caston)
How sad. He supervised my DPhil and was a wonderful supervisor and lovely man. So sorry to hear he has left us.
I did my PhD at Yale. I didn’t work closely with David, but I know many who did. He was so clearly loved and respected by all, and the quality of his mentorship was so greatly valued. One interaction with him that imprinted itself really strongly in my memory was when he led a career development session for the graduate students about teaching. Listening to what he had to say, I remember being profoundly struck by how deeply he clearly cared about his students and the quality of his own teaching. He will be sorely missed.
What a huge loss. David was so kind and wise, and giving of his time. His influence on the field can’t be overrated. He will be greatly missed.
I was deeply shocked and saddened to hear of David’s passing. We had just met in June and had an in-depth discussion about a range of topics in Aristotle’s physics, metaphysics, and psychology, following an even longer conversation in March. His clarity of thought and extraordinary intellectual energy made it difficult for me to imagine that he would leave us so soon.
I was never officially David’s student, but I visited Yale for a semester, and he later invited me to join by Zoom the last seminar he taught there. He, together with several other faculty members, including Brad, Michael, and Verity, was especially generous and helpful to me during my time there. I also remember giving a paper at an Eastern APA symposium to an audience of only about five people. He was one of them, and throughout the talk he kept smiling at me in encouragement. It is a small memory, but one that has stayed with me.
David’s philosophical work reflected many of the qualities that also marked his personality: warmth, gentleness, generosity, and a willingness to take other people’s views seriously. He was extraordinarily careful and precise in working out his own position while remaining deeply attentive to the arguments of others.
He will be deeply missed and remembered. His philosophical work, his example as a scholar, and the generosity he showed to so many of us will continue to have a lasting influence.
I was a DPhil student in Economics at Oriel. My wife Meena Dhanda was a DPhil student in Philosophy at Balliol. David was very friendly with us.Very kind and lovely person.
David was such a supportive and stimulating presence at Yale during my PhD, across a number of seminars, talks, reading groups, and conferences. He cared so deeply about Aristotle and really wanted to get things right, and it was clear that everything he did was oriented toward that end–but trying to get things right never got in the way of being kind. I hope heaven has an exact recreation of BNatural (the coffeeshop in New Haven that functioned as David’s office pre-pandemic).
I’m shocked by this news. David was my colleague at Yale for many years. He had a deep concern for philosophy, for our students, for excellence, for university governance, and (what might be less known about him) for social justice. His interests across fields of philosophy and domains of politics and life were broad and deep. He was a kind man, a deep philosopher, and wonderful colleague.
When I went to Oxford to do the BPhil in the 1980s, David’s was the first graduate seminar I attended. David presented the material that later appeared in his book on Aristotle’s philosophy of action. At the end of that seminar, he invited me to attend the informal philosophy of mind and language reading group he ran in his rooms in Oriel. Attended by graduate students and younger faculty, it was unusually non-hierarchical by Oxford standards at the time. David chaired all of the sessions and, much as had been the case in his graduate seminar, his main aim seemed to be to facilitate as much productive exchange as he could, something he did without having any preconceptions about which of the people attending would have something helpful to say. I had been a high school teacher in Australia prior to going to Oxford, so when I arrived I felt well out of the swing of things. David’s kindness and encouragement really turned things around for me. We kept in touch through the years. My most recent contact with him was when I give a talk as part off his graduate seminar at Yale. We followed that up with a private zoom session in which David worked his way through the many extremely insightful and helpful comments he’d made on the paper when he read it. As others have said, he was both a gifted philosopher and a lovely man. Vale David Charles.