There are some philosophers we hear a lot about—not just those in the canon, but also the “superstars” of today. These philosophers can often be inspirations on the page, motivating students to take up philosophy as a major course of study. But just as important—probably more so—are those undergraduate professors who inspired or motivated you to take philosophy seriously, or who helped cultivate your interest in the subject.
Just owing to numbers, it is unlikely that these people are among the relatively few “superstars” of philosophy. They may not be “philosophy-famous,” yet, without them, many readers here would not be, uh, readers here; that is, they wouldn’t be current or aspiring academic philosophers. So these folks are crucially important yet, in some cases, largely unknown.
In this week’s edition of The Stone in The New York Times, Simon Critchley (New School) notes this disparity between individual influence and social recognition:
Behind every new graduate student stands an undergraduate teacher. This is someone who opened the student’s eyes and ears to the possibility of the life of the mind that they had perhaps imagined but scarcely believed was within their reach. Someone who, through the force of their example, animated a desire to read more, study more and know more. Someone in whom the student heard something fascinating or funny or just downright strange. Someone who heard something significant in what the student said in a way that gave them confidence and self-belief. Such teachers are the often unknown and usually unacknowledged (and underpaid) heroes of the world of higher education.
Some lucky people have several such teachers…. But there is usually one teacher who sticks out and stays in one’s mind, and whose words resound down through the years…. It is also very often the case that the really good teachers don’t write or don’t write that much… They teach. They talk. Sometimes they even listen and ask questions.
Critchley then proceeds to pen a paean to one of the unsung heroes of his undergraduate philosophy education, Frank Cioffi.
It’s a good idea.
So, consider this an opportunity to acknowledge the teacher(s) who was able to spur or encourage or enhance your pursuit of philosophy when you were an undergraduate, to write down their names in a place for all—including their descendants and the philosophers of the future—to see. Add as much or as little detail or story as you like.
Great topic! I studied philosophy with three fantastic professors at Texas Christian University – Richard Galvin, Blake Hestir, and Gregg Franzwa. All three are brilliant philosophers and terrific teachers. They did an incredible job not only teaching us the course material but also, much more importantly, conveying to us the importance of living the examined life. I feel enormously grateful to have been able to study with them, and I know that many other people (including many other professional philosophers) do as well. Thanks to them for everything that they do, as well as to everyone else who plays a similar role for people!
As a first year grad student I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. When I was a sophomore one professor, Angela Coventry, picked me out among her early modern class and started encouraging me to develop my abilities more. As a first generation student it was very encouraging to have someone so brilliant that I admired believing in me and working with me. Everyone in the department was supportive of me, but there were times Angie and I’d go through four or five drafts of one of my papers in a week and I doubt I’d be where I am now without her and her dedication.
I had a lot of inspiring profs at Swarthmore that got me into philosophy. Those that stick out for me were Hans Oberdiek, Chuck Beitz, Richard Eldridge, and Ken Sharpe. But if I had an unsung hero prof in college it was Charles Raff. Somehow he conveyed a sense that we were tackling enduring and important problems but that we, college undergrads, might well solve them today. There was an unspoken sense that our voices were needed to get to the bottom of this matter. One great advantage for me of going to a place without grad students was a sense that we were on the front lines of the great philosophical problems–it never occurred to us that others were better positioned to get to the bottom of things.
At the University of South Carolina, Rosamond Kent Sprague, Herbert Matsen, and Robert Mulvaney all–in different styles–set great examples for me in combining close reading reading of texts with thinking about “big ideas.” They (and many other faculty there at the time) made the department a welcoming place for this insecure first generation college student.
My professor was the late Charles Bigger, who taught me as an undergraduate and Louisiana State University, and then directed my M.A. there is well. I took classes with him and then ended up assisting him as a grad student, and he was for me a living example of what a teacher of philosophy could be. He taught me how to read Plato (an amazing gift). He is truly the reason I am here teaching philosophy decades after studying with him. Fortunately, there is an interview on line with him that was done before he died, so I point you to it to get a sense of this amazing teacher and human being. http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=2
My undergrad philosophy education at Salve Regina University would have been greatly limited had Troy Catterson not joined our faculty during my sophomore year. He is a polymath, to be sure, and remains one of the most brilliant people I have ever encountered. He invests himself in teaching wholeheartedly and he is one of those professors who seems omnipresent on campus, able to stop for a chat at any moment. But this is not to say that he doesn’t write; he does. His publications range just as much as what he knows: from modal logic to his latest work in philosophy of religion on the Trinity. Yet, he constantly admits that he has not read enough or he discusses courses that he wishes he could teach someday (and believe me, he has a whole list). He has taught me the hard lesson that I will never finish being a student; not when I get into grad school and earn my Ph.D., not when I’ve gotten tenure, not when I retire. He has taught me interdisciplinarity without loss of depth. He has held me to a standard that exceeds the requirements of my program and my college. I hope that I have met his care for my success with committment and (hopefully) interesting work. Thank you to Dr. Catterson for preparing me so well for graduate study and a career in philosophy.
As an undergrad philosophy minor, I only took two courses from faculty. (When I returned as a major years later, I took great courses from amazing professors, but the die was cast at that point.)
So the philosophy teacher that got to me was a graduate student, Allen Habib (now of University of Calgary). There’s plenty more details, but–in my recollection–he embodied just about everything great about philosophy teaching: rigorous but friendly, conversational but scholarly, even teaching outside his area. So: thanks, Allen! I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for you.
Philip Clark was a grad student at UCLA and was working as a TA for Professor Yost’s ‘Skepticism and Rationality’ while I was an undergrad in the course. Although I had decided to major in philosophy, I did not do well on the first exam (I was positively mortified by my “B-“). I went to Philip’s office hours to try to figure out what it was that I didn’t quite get (clearly, it was *something*, and something substantial, to boot). Philip very patiently explained that I didn’t seem to have fully appreciated what the question was really asking. This was something of a revelation for me. I asked if he would give me another question so that I could try to get better at this whole ‘unpacking’ thing. The patience he showed – he gave me several questions and dutifully read the answers in order to see if I had started to ‘get it’ – still amazes me. I cannot imagine what a pain that must have been for him and have never forgotten what a star he is for having been kind enough to help me understand that process.
A bit later in my undergraduate career, I had the great good fortune to take a course with Warren Quinn; the course was designed to teach students how to read (and write) philosophy properly. I was stunned to learn that I didn’t actually know how to do this and cannot imagine what my intellectual life would have been like if I had not taken this instruction. I teach a similar course now and remember Professor Quinn fondly whenever I teach it. And while I would say that the courses I took with Jean Hampton had the most profound influence on my philosophical trajectory and interests, it really was the set of skills that I acquired from Philip Clark and Warren Quinn that let me profit from all of the rest of it.
This is indeed a great theme for discussion! I was fortunate to learn from a number of wonderful instructors when I was an undergrad philosophy major at Temple University.
Two professors made a particularly strong impact on me. Shelley Wilcox was/is a spectacular teacher and she also directed my undergraduate honors thesis. In addition to being such a dedicated teacher and talented philosopher, she also taught me and other students that one can be politically/socially engaged and be a philosopher at the same time (and that the two things can actually go together!). She provided tremendous encouragement, introduced me to feminist and political philosophy (thanks!) and Shelley’s own philosophical work inspired for me many of the research interests I am pursuing today.
Another important undergraduate mentor I learned from was Gerald Vision, who taught a fascinating Intro to Philosophy class that I continue to think back to today as I teach my own large Intro lecture. From the beginning, and throughout my undergrad years, he regularly demonstrated to me that he believed in my philosophical abilities, and this gave me the intellectual self-confidence I needed to become a philosophy major and think of myself as a philosopher. Without a doubt, were it not for these stellar instructors I would not be a professional philosopher today.
Wilcox is fantastic!
I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school without the influence of Peter Clark, Berys Gaut, and Graham Priest, all of whom taught at the University of St Andrews at the time.
Fantastic idea. For me, it was Jordan Lindberg at Central Michigan. He’s since left academic philosophy, but his logic and early analytic courses pulled me from a life of (ugh) business management and marketing and convinced me to take on philosophy. Just a brilliant guy, and a tremendously fun teacher.
Excellent topic! I want to send all my deepest anonymous respect and love to Andre Gallois, Graham Priest and Keith Simmons. Anything good that I am now, you made me. Anything bad that I am is my own fault.
I could sing the praises of my philosophy professors from the University of St. Thomas all day — I was planning to major in economics, but then I took my required philosophy intro class from Matthews Grant, and it was just an unbelievably rewarding experience, and at his encouragement, I took another philosophy course to fulfill one of my electives — and then I knew I didn’t want to stop. Heidi Giebel is such an incredible teacher (person, really), Michael Degnan is so encouraging, Jonathan Stoltz, in addition to being an impressive scholar, was always so generous with his time — I never actually took one of his classes, but he was nonetheless a wonderful resource for questions and philosophical conversation — but the two that stand out for me are John Kronen and Steve Laumakis. It was Laumakis who encouraged me to go graduate school (and very kindly explained what a stipend is when I didn’t think I could afford it), and it the first class with him (a cross-listed psychology/philosophy course, “Buddha’s Brain,” team-taught with Greg Robinson-Riegler) that made me decide to major in philosophy. He’s an amazing teacher. And John Kronen is a professor who you can go to with a question about Nyaya views of justification, and find yourself in a two-hour long conversation that winds its way round to Suárez, and you feel as though only a few minutes has passed. I certainly would have never gone to graduate school without their support, but more importantly — they challenged me, taught me how to think more clearly, be more charitable, and enjoy learning about philosophy.
I had many good teachers, many of whom are “superstars”, but the reason I am in philosophy is my high school teacher, Sergio Cicatelli. He is erudite, rigorous, authoritative, and cares about his students deeply. His very first class on what philosophy is enraptured me completely, perfectly conveying the sense of wonder and curiosity from which philosophical inquiry stems.
Studying (history of) philosophy in high school is fairly common in Italy. Much less common is close textual reading outside of short anthological pieces. In his class we read the Phaedo, parts of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, The Discourse on the Method, a slightly abridged version of Kant’s Second Critique, and, had my teacher not moved to another school to start as a principal, we would have read Husserl and Heidegger. Reading those works was rewarding and exciting, and made me love studying the history of philosophy.
I am grateful for the education I received in the United States, and aware of the many advantages American, and “Anglophone” Academia more generally, has over the Italian one. But there are a lot of great philosophers and philosophy teachers all over the world, and some lessons I heard in Italy as a high school student were more sophisticated than stuff I subsequently read in journal articles, and I am grateful for that starting point.
Thanks, Justin, for starting this thread.
Prof. Steven Levy of UCLA and Prof. David Makinson of LSE are my heroes.
I first met Prof Levy in Logic First Course at the summer school 2012. Second week into the course (out of six) and I was already hooked onto solving logic deduction problems on the exercise software (and as far as I heard, many students are as well), to the extent that doing those exercises are a source of entertainment – much like doing a harder version of Sudoku. Prof Levy would actually spent hours in the office, just doing his own work while we did exercises until we had questions. He is also incredibly funny and have a way to explain difficult concepts.
Prof Makinson was my lecturer while I audited the advanced logic course at LSE (despite I wasn’t a student at LSE). Prof Makinson’s patience is the epitome of what education should be like – he would patiently guide you through ridiculously stupid questions (could be as simple as not seeing a simple Modus Ponens would solve the problem) when he could perfectly well turn his back on an external auditing student. To quote him, ‘no question is stupid’. I am forever thankful to Prof Levy and Prof Makinson, but I am particularly in debt to Prof Makinson, since he still helps me over the email on logic related questions.
What a wonderful prompt!
I went to Swarthmore too (like David Sobel, above), and Ken Sharpe is also on my list of teachers without whom I would not be who I am. But for me the three people who stand out with respect to my relationship to philosophy are Rich Schuldenfrei, Rosemary Desjardins and a political theorist named Doug Bennett — who wasn’t at Swarthmore, but who was friends with Ken, and was a Quaker, and got me to go visit the place, after I took two classes with him at Temple University as a high school student.
Doug Bennett awoke in me what I would describe as a love of form, and a preoccupation with underlying assumptions. He did this by asking perfect questions, questions that invited one to attend to form and assumptions both. Without this background, I would not have been as perfectly primed as I was for my Intro to Philosophy class with Rich Schuldenfrei.
It is hard to convey, to someone who never had a class with Schuldenfrei, let alone back then, just how arresting of an experience this was — though generations of Swarthmore students can back me up on it. Schuldenfrei was similar to how David Sobel describes Raff as being (I never had a class with Raff), in the sense that there was absolutely no question, in his presence (a) that he seriously didn’t give a fuck about anything other than figuring out what was true about important things; and (b) that he expected that of us, too. But Schuldenfrei did things like threaten to drop a chair on the head of a kid who thought that Hume was right, and that it was perfectly possible that the chair wouldn’t fall that time. What I mean is that he held the chair over the kid’s head and threatened to drop it. In those days he wore blue jeans and a work shirt, always and only. Once, when I was a junior, or maybe even a senior, he showed up in a yellow chamois shirt – it made such an impression upon me that I still remember it. He wore blue jeans and a work shirt, and work boots too, paced around in the front of the room, and engaged us as freshmen – confronted us, even – with viscerally compelling, relentless intellectual and moral intensity, mainly in the vernacular and tones of a Brooklyn cab driver. As I understand it, Schuldenfrei had been trained up in logical positivism at Pitt. He’d left that stuff behind by the time that I had him, but he did assign Language, Truth & Logic to us as freshmen, and I learned from him that empiricists have a hard time with causation. I’ve been dedicating books and thanking him in Acknowledgements ever since.
Rosemary was completely unlike Richie in comportment, and unlike Richie she was patient and calm intellectually — though she was equally intense about the pursuit of true beliefs. The memory of her that I have that sums up what she was like, and what her personality taught me about philosophy as an endeavor, was once, when I was confused about something, her locking eyes with me – she had beautiful, steely, Athena-like eyes – and not letting go until I’d understood. As though she were inviting a toddler to take faltering steps. Rosemary taught Ancient philosophy, and she was someone who thought that Plato wrote in a literary way on purpose, so as to effect a desire for, and experience of, philosophical beauty. One afternoon in her seminar I swear I felt the very “flaring up of the soul” that Plato describes in the 7th Letter. I think that that flash of whatever it was is the closest that I have ever come to a mystical experience.
Thanks so much, Justin, for inviting us to share these stories.
I wouldn’t be in graduate school without the help and influence of Gordon Bearn, Robin Dillon, and Greg Reihman at Lehigh University. The years spent in that tiny little building, talking philosophy for hours on end, were some of my best so far.
Jeff Seidman, Miranda Fricker, Tim Sundell, Clare Batty and Meg Wallace. Great philosophers. The finest teachers. Better human beings.
Bernard Molyneux and Robert May, both of University of California, Davis (at least when I was there).
This is a really great idea. I was blessed with a number of truly excellent philosophy professors in my undergraduate years, all of whom inspired me and shaped me in different ways. The one I’d like to mention here is Blair Morrissey, my very first philosophy instructor way back when I first started out at Muskegon Community College. Back then I had no clue what I wanted to do, and signed up for an introduction to philosophy class in my first semester simply because it sounded like it might be fun. It was Blair’s class that made me first fall in love with philosophy, and the questions we struggled with then (especially free will!) have been bouncing around in my head ever since.
In no particular order …. Doc Mayo, Eve Browning and David Cole …. they are my exemplars
Not entirely unsung, since he did get a shout-out in my dissertation: Michael Byrd, UW-Madison. I took every class he offered during my 6 years (BA + MA) there, including the one I couldn’t take. When my senior year of high school I took a logic class at the local two-year university and LOVED it, I scoured UW-Madison’s course catalog, I found there was an upper level logic course, and I decided to take it before I even got my acceptance letter. And then the semester came around when I was going to take it…and it conflicted with 3rd semester Greek, which I needed in order to graduate. I went to him, explained the situation, and he — completely unsolicited — offered to run the course with me as a directed study. We met once a week (in comparison to the rest of the class getting 3 lectures a week), and during that time he guided me through how to prove Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems and how to be an excellent teacher. In addition to all the classes I took from him, he also regularly led term-time and summer-time modal logic reading groups. His Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein class was my first introduction to analytic philosophy, and it shaped my entire undergraduate career.
I should also give a shout-out to Ken Kunen (UW-Madison, math) who was willing to take a philosopher who’d never gotten beyond pre-calc and shepherd her through graduate seminars in mathematical logic. His unfailing patience even when I showed up at his office hours week after week I will always remember gratefully.
Michael Byrd was amazing! He changed my life. I was a new graduate student and didn’t even get my BA in Philosophy, but I loved writing lemmas and he generously shared office-hour time to go over my (often unnecessary) shortcuts. He encouraged me to get a grad degree in Philosophy when I was from nowhere. What a kind, kind soul.
Agree. I remember as an undergrad, getting to take the graduate Symbolic Logic with Byrd, and he was writing a proof on the board, then turned around and took off his glasses, and said, “No amount of eyeballing what I do will teach you logic. You have to do the proofs yourself.” Wakeup moment. He was awesome.
In different ways, Bob Feleppa, David Soles, and Jay Mandt.
Feleppa and Soles (both David and Debby) also deserve huge credit for their influence on fresh-out-of-grad-school junior faculty. Tremendous mentors, excellent colleagues, and outstanding people.
I did my undergraduate work at Arizona State University and had a number of excellent professors. This was a fortunate coincidence because, when I was deciding where to attend college, I had no idea I would end up majoring in philosophy. It just so happened that ASU had a number of excellent teachers (most who also had accomplished publishing records) in their department. I took the majority of my philosophy courses from Steven Reynolds, Stewart Cohen, Tom Blackson, Margaret Walker, Bernard Kobes, Cheshire Calhoun and Doug Portmore. Each made significant contributions to my (as well as countless others) philosophical progress.
I worked with Doug Portmore more than anyone and he has, far and away, had the largest impact on my philosophical thought. It was a privilege to take his courses as an undergraduate. He understood and presented the material so clearly that it was near impossible not to have a crystal clear understanding of the works being discussed. He dedicated inordinate amounts of time to helping students who sought it and approached each philosophical work with an infectious level of passion.
I would not be pursuing a career in philosophy were it not for these excellent professors.
My unsung hero was Catherine Cater at North Dakota State University in Fargo. She just passed away this last summer at the age of 98. When she was my mentor, she was in her early 80’s, still walking to school every day, teaching like she was on fire. She had grown up in the south, her father had been friends with W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she had met as a little girl. She came to Fargo in the early 1950’s after leaving Olivet College in Vermont in protest over academic freedom issues. She infused every philosophy class with poetry and literature, and she inspired all her students to work extremely hard. When she wrote “See Strunk” on your paper, you knew you had some work to do. Her mantra was “Be specific; give examples”, which still resonates in the back of my head. She pushed me hard to get out of North Dakota and go to grad school, which I’m quite thankful of, even though I ended up back very close to home (where I luckily get to push students in similar ways).
A prompt that is also an ambition! For me, in order of appearance, Robert Horn and Peter Suber at Earlham College. I had a fantastic education in philosophy as an undergraduate–I showed up in graduate school overprepared. Lucky lucky lucky.
I did not study philosophy as an undergraduate but started with an M.A. at the now, sadly, defunct Bedford College, London. I had a number of excellent teachers there, including, as my very first, Brian O’Shaughnessy, with whom I plunged straight into reading Sartre and Heidegger. But most of all, Mark Sainsbury was a wonderful and exemplary teacher. He always strove to help me express my own ideas better rather than telling me how it was.
I was fortunate enough to take a philosophy course while still in high school, which is unusual in America. Thanks Dr. Tom Joyce of McLean High School
I had the good fortune to take classes some from amazing thinkers, many of whom also happened to be exceptional teachers. I can still recall the wit and erudition of Bernard Williams’ lectures, and John Searle’s legendary gruffness. But one person stands out as having done the most to put me on the path to a philosophical career: Bruce Vermazen. Bruce wrote on aesthetics and action theory, but more importantly (to me), he gave me strong and encouraging comments on my writing and allowed me to take his graduate seminar on Mental Causation when I was a senior. At the time I was obsessed with the topic, and while I’m sure the grads in the room rolled their eyes at my clumsy attempts to grasp what Davidson, Kim, and Burge were up to, Bruce was patient and supportive through many painful drafts of my final paper. He was a great interlocutor and probably the closest thing that I had to a mentor in my antisocial and depressive late-adolescent state. I had known that he was a cornet player, but I was delighted to see that after retiring from philosophy he went on to write a sparkling and well-received book on the history of jazz in vaudeville (That Moaning Saxophone: The Six Brown Brothers and the Dawning of a Musical Craze, OUP 2008). I doubt that he’ll see this, but just in case: thanks for everything, Bruce.
Kris Phillips mentioned me above, though Kris is by all accounts an outstanding and inspiring teacher of philosophy himself with fiercely loyal students of his own. He is in the first 10% of what will be an outstanding career that will impact many lives for the better. For myself, I was blessed to have wonderful undergraduate teachers at Albion College. Ned Garvin, who passed from cancer several years ago and decades too early, was a remarkable teacher of philosophy — inspiring, exacting, funny, erudite, and infectious — he was a natural storyteller, with rich and diverse personal interests that he was eager to share with his students. He invited us to participate in his scholarship, opened his house up to us, and introduced me to a larger world that included philosophy, but also things like fly angling, quality scotch, zydeco music, wooden canoes, and great bean soup. Other philosophers at Albion likewise impacted me entirely for the better including Gene Cline and Jorg Baumgartner, both now retired.
my favorite undergraduate philosophy professor was Eddy Moerloose, who taught Indian philosophy and religion at Ghent University. His classes were relaxed, interactive, relatively unstructured; we’d sit together and think about concepts in Indian philosophy in detail. He also invited us to watch a (I forgot (6 hour, 9 hour), version of the Mahabharata. A bit regrettably, while his classes kindled an interest in philosophy, I have not taken up any study of Indian philosophy (in part because Moerloose emphasized how important language and linguistic form is in Indian philosophy, and I did not learn any Sanskrit).
Carl B. Sachs (now at Marymount University). He spent endless hours challenging my ideas and ripping my papers to shreds. I would write, rewrite, and re-rewrite, hoping to craft something that he thought was decent. During the summer between undergrad and grad school, I published my first paper. Although it was in an interdisciplinary journal, it was accepted with minor revisions. Without his generosity and keen eye for nuance, the paper wouldn’t not have been worth publishing. When I write today, I hear his voice in my head: “This is way too wordy.” “This makes NO sense!” “You need to read at least two books by Philosopher X to gain a basic understanding of this topic.” Haha, good times.
Pete LeGrant of Bakersfield College, formerly the University of Iowa.
MY high school Philosophy teacher was Giovanna Moschieri and she is the one who not only introduced me to philosophy, but made me understand that for a living I wanted to teach it. Giovanna Moschieri wanted clarity, precision, and extended study. As a neo-Thomist she gave me a strong foundation in ontology and classical logic, and even though I have moved away completely from her orientation, I am grateful for the discipline I learned with her.
In my undergraduate studies I had many super-star professors ( within the limits of academic philosophy stardom) but the one who left a mark was the Philosophy of Law professor, Luigi Lombardi Vallauri, who was living and breathing philosophy and who taught me what it is like to let philosophy inform your life. He was also a crazy guru- style thinker whose provocative ideas made him declared heretic at my super-traditional Catholic University. With him I read widely and learned to question everything.
Thank you for starting this post.
Thanks for this suggestion! Dan Garber was not only a great lecturer in the classroom, but also a very kind and generous mentor and undergrad advisor. He had immense patience and kindness, and yet did not shy from challenging me. He inspired love of philosophy and set an example as a scholar and teacher. Robert Richards and Howard Stein were also great teachers (as well as scholars), and inspired my interest in the intersection of history and philosophy of science.
I can certainly second Howard Stein — he instilled in me a (not entirely healthy?) love of Carnap.
Anya, thank you so much! I’m deeply touched.
Two for me were Roger Florka (the TA for the first philosophy course I took at UCLA, now at Ursinus College) and Thomas F. Tracy, who was visiting at UCLA for a couple of years when I was there.
I don’t think I would be in graduate school if it weren’t for Greg Bassett (Hope College). Hands down some of the best critical feedback I have ever gotten from a professor; hardworking, punctual grader, inspiring, and respectfully argumentative–everything you could ask for in a philosophy professor. I’m a better writer (though still learning) because of him.
I’m delighted to see that someone else has already mentioned Rosemary Desjardins. As an undergrad at Penn, I was supposed to have had Charles Khan for ancient, but he was on sabbatical that year and so they brought in Rosemary. I was never bothered by this in the slightest, because Rosemary was an amazing professor. Her ancient course was the high point of my undergrad education and largely the impetus for my decision to pursue graduate study. I also need to mention the other unsung hero of my undergrad, Jonathan Jacobs. Another fantastic professor, and just as Rosemary’s class was the impetus to go to grad school, Jon’s was the reason I became a philosophy major in the first place. I owe them both a huge debt. I am under the impression that Rosemary is no longer with us, but I did keep in touch with her throughout graduate school and early in my career. Jon, fortunately, is still active in the profession. Thanks for suggesting we write about this!
I’ll never forget Charles T. McGruder, of Mount San Antonio College, modeling for me the need to be an advocate for your students.
This, as much as the thrill I got reading philosophy, endeared me to it. From there I was never more passionate about anything else.
The undergrad professor who inspired me to become both a philosopher and a teacher was Dr. Brendan Liddell of Bradley University. His style of teaching, heavy on discussion but requiring copious reading before discussion, combined Socratic Dialogue, precise supplemental lectures, and essay exams that stretched our thoughts to consider new angles and ideas while writing the exam. He also acted a public philosopher who was active in the political and social arenas of 1960’s Illinois. I remember his protest, walking with a sign in front of the local Catholic school that was requiring a declaration of loyalty of its students (his children were students there). In all of his in-class and outside endeavors he was a model for me and generations of Bradley students.
I urge those of you who have such a teacher that you would, in retrospect, wish to thank for their positive influence on your life to do so ASAP. I sent Dr. Liddell such a thank you letter two years ago and received a reply from his wife thanking me and including his obituary; he had died a few months before in his 90’s. Don’t wait to let those who influence you know their efforts are appreciated, you might not get a chance to do so again.
Thank you Dr. Liddell. Without your influence I might not have become a philosophy professor myself for 35 years. If I was nearly as effective in inspiring some of my students as you were for me, I can take pride in approaching that high standard.
In 1964 the Philosophy Department at Newcastle consisted of five teachers: four full-time and one half-time – all very different from each other and yet, each in their own way, the ideal person to introduce people to the subject. The Professor and Head was Karl Britton, who had studied under Wittgenstein. Slim, neat, dapper, with well groomed silver hair, he always wore a three-piece suit and tie. We were all in awe of him, though he was a very kind man. He would ask questions with obvious answers, such as ‘how does an Intuitionist know these moral truths?’ and then look at us in bewilderment as we all thought the obvious answer could not be the correct one! He did not write a lot, but he published a book on the meaning of life while we were there. I remember writing an essay for him on that topic, in which I argued that life would only have meaning if there were objective values. He looked at me rather sadly, and said: ‘this is a fine essay, but you don’t mention death.’ To which, with all the invulnerability of youth, I replied that I had not thought it relevant.
Colin Strang taught us Ancient Philosophy – mainly Plato, because he said he did not think he knew enough about Aristotle to teach it well! So two whole years of Plato’s Dialogues. Wonderful. Tall, stringy, with a small military style moustache, he was also dapper, and chain-smoked small cigars. He would often stretch with his hands above his head, causing his trousers to slip down a little revealing a glimpse of coloured patterned shorts – something none of us then had ever seen. He would always address the members of the audience as ‘chaps’ even when a majority were women. Rumour had it that he was a communist and, when he inherited his father’s title, would become the first communist peer in the House of Lords. (I see from his obituary in the Guardian that he took up his seat but was not active. [http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jan/20/colin-strang ] Whether he really had communist sympathies I do not know.) Apart from an abiding love of Plato, Colin taught me to read texts closely and to argue with care. Many years after I had graduated he contacted me at Keele and said he did not think he would be publishing any more on Plato and would I like his books. He duly arrived with a large trunk full of texts and hard to find commentaries – a characteristically kind gesture.
Then there were the Midgleys: Geoff, the spitting image of the Prof. in Back to the Future, and his wife Mary, who was then half time. Colin was as untidy and unkempt as Karl and Colin were neat and tidy. He had a fine-tuned sense of the ridiculous, and made the driest philosophical topic engaging. His laugh was contagious although, because of his bronchitis from smoking, it nearly always ended up as a racking cough. Geoff had the untidiest desk I have ever seen (though I am running him a close second!) It was piled high with not only books and papers but also parts of a flute (he played) and what looked like bits of a car engine. One day, in searching through this pile for a book he pulled out a letter, read it, and exclaimed: ‘it’s a request for a reference I haven’t answered … well, no use now, it’s two years old.’ At which point, he thrust the letter back into the tottering pile! Geoff’s main interest was logic and early twentieth century philosophy. His final year exam on the Tractatus consisted of ten quotations from that work, with the single instruction, Comment, after each one. I once spent a whole term with him studying the Vienna Circle, especially Carnap. We thought him the smartest of a very intelligent department, but he was completely uninterested in publishing. He could not see the point. (He had, I believe, two publications, each in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, which requires publication of invited talks.) Rather, what he wanted was to do philosophy and, above all, to introduce students to it.
Mary Midgley mainly lectured on ethics and would, in moments of intensity, close her eyes and run her hands through her hair. I remember two special incidents. The first was when, in the course of explaining why she preferred Kant’s moral theory to utilitarianism, she gave the example of an old people’s home where they had taken away people’s glasses, hearing aids, etc. and filled them full of tranquilizers, making life easier for all. Rightly shocked by this, she explained Kant’s stress on the importance of rational autonomy before apostrophizing, ‘You see, Professor Britton, life is just more complicated than you realize.’ (Karl gave the lectures on Bentham and Mill.) The other was a conversation with Colin who claimed to be both a hard determinist and a utilitarian. ‘But, Colin, it is important to people’s dignity that they be held responsible for their actions’ to which he replied, ‘I’m very happy to blame people, Mary, if it will make them happier.’ She and Geoff were cheerful and bohemian, living in a large and untidy house. Incredibly kind and caring they always had at least one angst-ridden student lodging with them, so that they could look after them. I was totally unaware at the time that Mary’s contemporaries at Somerville were Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch. When I went to stay with her later while giving a talk to the Philosophy Group in Newcastle (the department having been axed by a technocrat Vice-Chancellor) I asked her about them. She was a great admirer of Iris Murdoch’s philosophy and wished she had continued with it, instead of writing ‘those novels’.
Finally, there was Don Locke, the youngest and an exemplar of the new breed of philosopher. Don published books and articles at a rate that would now be considered normal, but which seemed frenetic back then. His lectures were models of how to organize material and convey it in an accessible way. He was careful and punctilious almost to a fault. He once began a lecture thus: ‘There are thirteen arguments in the literature against phenomenalism, and all of them are unsound.’ And off he went, through all thirteen.
Looking back, I do not think we then appreciated how lucky we were. The staff (faculty)-student ratio was absurd. We were the largest year they ever had, their annus mirabilis, with eight people reading philosophy as a single subject (major) and eight reading it as a double major. Karl and Geoff had persuaded the university that we needed a lecture room in the department, though they had no intention of using it as such. Rather, it was a common room for both students and teachers, unsurprisingly labelled The Cave. We virtually lived in there, drinking endless coffee and discussing philosophy. We would be joined by at least one of the staff on most days, who would give their time unstintingly to our enthusiastic questioning. I felt perfectly free to knock on any door and ask a philosophical question; nor were the answers brief. I would be welcomed in and given as much time as I liked. That generosity spilled over into social life; we were often invited to parties at the houses of staff. Finally, there was the tutorial system. Two people to a tutor, taking it in turns to read an essay. Since I was often paired with students who did not show up, I received, in effect, individual supervision. Since my stay there lasted four years, this was more like a graduate than an undergraduate education; indeed, in some ways we had more access to faculty than students in most graduate programs.
This was a group of people who were widely read, thoughtful, engaged; members of an old-fashioned intelligentsia. Suffering none of the pressures of the modern publish or perish regime, they saw their mission as opening young minds and, above all, showing how enjoyable philosophy was. Those who know me will easily guess on which person in that department I have modelled myself right down, to my chagrin, to the untidiness. When I went to Geoff’s memorial service I gave a lift to the former departmental secretary on the way back to the reception. I apologized for the hiking equipment and other detritus littering the interior. She took one look and said: ‘Geoff would have been proud of this car!’
I have only one regret, namely that I did not go there a year later for, in 1968, the department appointed a very bright chap called Mike Brearley. He did not stay long because he decided he had more to offer to cricket than to philosophy. In that he was probably right, since he went on to become the best captain England’s cricket team have ever had. I would love to have met him.
I love this. Thank you so much for writing in such detail.
As an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, I wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue philosophy. One of my philosophy professors, Dr. William (Bill) Abbott, asked me to come see him in his office one day. I wasn’t sure what to expect. He surprised me by telling me he saw philosophical talent in me and he encouraged me to develop it. That affirmation and his continuing kindness and guidance over the years it took me to complete my BA and MA at UW (with an MA thesis on Hume and Reid, directed by Abbott) played a pivotal role in my choosing a career I’ve enjoyed tremendously. I’m very grateful to him for graciously nudging me toward this profession.
Julie Tannenbaum, now at Pomona. An absolutely phenomenal teacher. And scary smart.
My undergraduate education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville? I want to give special mention to Dr. David Reidy, Dr. John Nolt, and Dr. Richard Aquila. These are the people who first taught me how to do philosophy. I owe them a debt I can never repay. I’m not sure I like calling them “unsung heroes,” but they are certainly some of my heroes. While reflecting on my undergraduate education, I am also reminded of a certain philosophy professor who deserves the appellation “villian.” I won’t name this asshole, but a thread in which we can complain about worthless cranks would be a nice addition!
I have had my career because philosophy captivated me through my only undergrad philosophy prof at Northwest Nazarene College (now U)–J.W. Jones. Yes, I said “only”–he *was* the department, and I took 9 classes from him. I can’t bore you with all my Jones’ stories–this post would become a novella–but what I must say is that his own obvious enthusiasm was contagious, and I caught it with my own terminal case of loving to teach. He was a late PhD–in his 50s–from Boston U under Peter Bertocci–and so Jones only ended up teaching about 10 years and never published a thing as far as I know. Yeah, he was weak in contemporary stuff, which I had to catch up on in grad school, but his first-rate training in the history of philosophy has served me very well. Besides me, he has students-now-profs at UCLA, Eastern Carolina, and elsewhere in related fields. I still see a bit of him in my own teaching today, and I thank him posthumously for his inspiration; thank you Justin for this opportunity to say that.
Since Scott Hagaman brought them up, as a footnote to my paean to J. W. Jones, my grad career at UT-Knoxville also was graced by Aquila (I owe you so much Rich: you loaned me the cash to fly for the interview for this job, now in my 35th year), another Jones–Roger–who inspired my love of the philosophy of science (but left Tennessee during my grad stint), a very young but very good Nolt (forgive me all that stupidity that I’m still paying for), and especially Rem Edwards, my dissertation director. It pains me that UTK is never, never mentioned as a place to do the PhD. It was, and is, a terrific place to study philosophy.
Bloomsburg University had (and still has) an amazing group of philosophers/philosophy teachers: Scott Lowe, Wendy Lynne Lee, Richard Brook and Steven Hales were there when I did my undergraduate work. I started as an English Lit major, there, but quickly switched because they after classes with them, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. They must’ve been cursing me back then for sucking up so much of their time during office hours, between classes, etc. — but they never let on, and their encouragement was life-changing.
Walter Schaller, Texas Tech University. “You’re pretty good at sniping other people’s views. But what do YOU think?”
“Wally,” as we fondly referred to him behind his back, was the toughest philosophy prof I ever encountered. His bullshit meter is bullet proof. I learned so much from him – including how to create headaches for former members of the Bush administration.
John Daniel Wright (KCL), Stephen Williams and Brian King (Worcester College)
Sofronis Sofroniou of University of Nicosia (formerly Intercollege), Cyprus, circa 1995. I am so grateful to him for showing me that it’s OK to be interested in philosophy when all around you are studying business administration. He is my philosophical ‘ded’ (Russian for grandfather).
Stan Kane (at Miami University) introduced me to environmental ethics and to ancient philosophy, helping me to recover from philosophical dogmas into which I’d fallen and allowing me to rediscover my early fascination with ecology and natural history. He was infinitely patient with students (including me) who asked questions and made claims that, in retrospect, seem entirely daft. He would often respond to such questions and claims with a wry smile and an almost rueful “Well, that’s problematic, isn’t it?”