The department faculty below have recently passed away. Our thoughts and condolences go out to the family, friends, and colleagues of each.
Our colleague and comrade in philosophy at the University of Chicago, Jonathan Lear, passed away on September 23, 2025. Jonathan was the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy.
In April 2024, Jonathan gave the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture—given since 1972, the entirety of the University of Chicago faculty nominate one of their peers who has made “research contributions of lasting significance” to give this lecture. At the invitation, Jonathan said, ““It is an honor to be invited to give the Ryerson Lecture. I am delighted and very much look forward to trying out some ideas with my colleagues.” His talk, “Gratitude, Mourning, Hope and Other Forms of Thought,” explored what it entails to express gratitude. Today, we are both reflecting on how grateful we are for Jonathan’s life and presence in our community.
The ideas Jonathan pursued throughout his distinguished career were remarkable, wide-ranging, and impactful across fields and interests. As his friend and colleague Robert Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy, noted in remembrance, “Jonathan’s work spanned an extraordinary range of disciplines and topics. He published two early, highly regarded books on Aristotle, one on his logical theory, and the other on his general approach to philosophy and metaphysics. He continued to publish on ancient philosophy but also wrote several very influential and path-breaking articles on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, including his own speculations on Wittgenstein’s revolutionary approach to philosophy. Trained and licensed as a psychoanalyst (which he practiced at Yale and on the fifth floor of Foster Hall at Chicago), he published in psychoanalytic journals and on the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, both for those audiences and for a more general public. During the controversies about Freud in the nineteen-nineties, Lear was the most prominent international defender of psychoanalysis. He wrote a highly original interpretation of Freud, Love and its Place in Nature, in 1990 right before he joined the Committee on Social Thought in 1994, and in much of his later work he combined his interests in ancient thought, Wittgenstein, Freud, and Kierkegaard in several books and collections on such fundamental human topics as love, happiness, death, hope, irony, wisdom, mourning and in the work he was working on when he died, gratitude. He was especially proud of his 2006 book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, a book about the Crow tribe with whom he had become quite close in working on the book. In often deeply moving prose, he chronicled and analyzed how the Crow were able to maintain hope after the loss, or rather the destruction, of their traditional way of life. It has become a book for our times, when the possibility of hope in the future seems an ever more difficult possibility.”
Among his many achievements, Jonathan was a recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. A member of the University of Chicago faculty since 1996, he served as the inaugural Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium from 2014 to 2022. He trained in Philosophy at Cambridge University and The Rockefeller University where he received his PhD in 1978. He joined UChicago from Yale University.
Our university and department was graced by his presence for three decades. As an inspiring teacher, a devoted mentor, an indefatigable departmental citizen, a gentle critic, and a supportive friend—he will be sorely missed in many ways. Blessed be his memory!
The Department of Philosophy encourages those of you who knew Jonathan — as a colleague, teacher, mentor, or friend — to contribute your reminiscences of him to this webpage. Please send your reminiscence to William Weaver at wweaver@uchicago.edu.
A remembrance from Department of Philosophy faculty member Matthew Boyle:
I first met Jonathan Lear in the late 1990s, when I visited Chicago as a prospective graduate student. I had read and been deeply impressed by Lear’s striking, metaphysical interpretation of psychoanalysis in Love and Its Place in Nature (1990), and I thought of him as a famous person — which, within the boundaries of academia at least, he was. So when I was informed that I would be having “lunch with Professor Lear,” I was quite nervous and resolved to order something simple that would not give me a lot to manage while we had our meeting. I consequently ordered some kind of sandwich and an orange juice, only to find when the food arrived that I was brought a large plate of orange halves and a pump-handled juicing mechanism. “You knew we do juice-your-own?” the waiter said. I remember saying “Sure” — I don’t know why I felt embarrassed to admit otherwise — and then trying to brazen things out while Lear and I talked about Melanie Klein, with me all the while pumping and squirting little sprays of orange juice in unpredictable directions. It was a moment made for psychoanalysis, and over the course of knowing him, I came to realize that Jonathan — as I eventually came to call him — had the power to elicit this sort of thing from people, a power he somehow managed to exercise in the classic analytic manner, by withholding comment and just letting people expose their inner lives to him, as we all somehow wanted to do.
I had the fortunate opportunity to make a second and better impression on Jonathan starting in 2009, when he came with his family to give the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Harvard, where I had got my first job. Jonathan and his partner, the philosopher Gabriel Lear, took an interest in me, and when a few years later Jonathan won a very generous prize from the Mellon Foundation, he invited me to co-teach a seminar with him and paid for me to fly weekly to Chicago for the purpose. That wonderful and stimulating experience led eventually to my moving to the University of Chicago in 2015, where Jonathan and Gabriel became my colleagues and Jonathan and I went on to teach two more seminars together, each of which was an intellectual watershed for me. The first of these was a seminar on imagination in which Jonathan taught a glorious sequence of classes on Freud’s concept of dream work and the way that human sexuality is permeated, down to its most basic elements, by imagination. The second was a seminar on the notion of “the world” considered as a totality, in which Jonathan taught sections of his beautiful final book, Imagining the End (2022), in which he analyzes fantasies about the end of the world and their connection with our ability or inability to mourn what we have lost.
The title of that book, “Imagining the End,” makes it sound valedictory, but I do not think at the time that Jonathan had any thought of its being his final book. Even after he was diagnosed with a serious cancer a year or so later, his prospects seemed hopeful. His sudden death has caught everyone who cared about him very much unprepared. I had been exchanging emails with him about getting together, but not with any sense of urgency. There are many things I wish I had had the opportunity to say to him. For all the brilliancy of his work, one of his most striking qualities was his ability to facilitate other people in discovering their own best thoughts. More than any academic of comparable stature that I have encountered, he loved to listen to other people talk about subjects they knew well. He used to tell a story about doing this as a boy in Provincetown, where his family spent time in the summers, and a boyish delight came over him whenever somebody said something thought-provoking in his presence. His generosity of interest helped many people find their voices, and he did this for me in a way I believe he recognized, but which I wish I had acknowledged more fully before now.
Jonathan put his power to draw out the thoughts of other people to an especially significant use in one of his best known books, Radical Hope (2006), a reflection on the ethical problem of facing the demise of one’s way of life, which grew out of a sustained and deep engagement with the Apsáalooke Nation of Native American people. He told the story of that engagement in the book, and I am hardly the person to add detail, except to say that for decades after the book was published, he would return regularly to the Apsáalooke Reservation to visit people he had gotten to know, and that one of his proudest accomplishments was to have brought a delegation of Apsáalooke people to Chicago in 2020 for a parade to inaugurate an exhibition — the first curated by an indigenous scholar — of Apsáalooke art and artifacts at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
The latter event was also characteristic of Jonathan in another way, namely that, in spite of the modesty of his self-presentation, one was periodically reminded that his life transcended ordinary academia. He was often being called on to have a “public conversation” with some well-known personage or other, and it would periodically emerge — despite his best efforts to keep such things under wraps — that he and Gabriel had recently had some bigwig over to dinner. I often had the vague sense when meeting with him that he was about to be helicoptered somewhere.
In his personal life, such as I knew it, Jonathan had a fondness for Macallan whisky and a wonderful way of telling stories about the absurdity and vainglory of academic life — none of which I can repeat for fear of offending those still living. He had been following Bob Dylan since Dylan’s early days as a coffee shop performer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he had a persuasive sense of some connection between their two lives which makes me fear now for Dylan’s well-being. After his cancer diagnosis, Jonathan lived with an awareness of mortal illness in a remarkable way, giving no sign that I could discern of anxiety or regret or diminished pleasure in ordinary things, but getting if anything all the more happiness from life with his family, from teaching, and from thinking about the topics in philosophy and psychoanalysis that he had always loved.
For me, he was one of the pillars on which I rested my sense of the value of my own work. I suspect I am not alone in finding it helpful, when writing, to imagine a person who might appreciate what I am up to and see the best in it. It is not easy to find such people, and Jonathan was a crucial one for me. I suspect he would say something psychoanalytic about this — or rather, he would think something psychoanalytic, but gracefully refrain from saying it in order not to throw grit into my mechanism. I will miss him very much, for that reason and many others.
A remembrance from Department of Philosophy colleague Michael Kremer:
Jonathan was my colleague for 21 years. Of course, he was a wonderful philosopher. But he was also a great colleague. He was one of the first of my colleagues to make me feel at home at Chicago when I moved there. We disagreed over some matters of course. But his was one of the wisest heads in the department. I am sorry I did not see as much of him after the pandemic caused much departmental life (including department meetings and the chance they provided for chance interactions) to dry up. I worked with him closely on some committees and always valued his view and often followed his lead. He made committee work enjoyable.
I have read less of his philosophy than I would like, but was able to see him speak on numerous occasions and always learned from him. I will mention one of his works that was particularly important to me (others have also mentioned it, but in my case it had a relatively unique significance). When my first wife, Angela, died in 2010, his book Radical Hope was relatively recent, and I read it in a couple of weeks. I found it greatly comforting and helpful even though it was not directly about my experience. The idea of finding "radical hope" in a situation where it seemed that the meaning had been sucked out of life and that there was no way to go on, was what inspired me. I could easily resonate then with these claims: after this, nothing happened; I am trying to live a life I do not understand. The example of Plenty Coups finding a way to go on in such a circumstance served as a model for me. I wrote to him in a pretty personal vein about all this, ending with “I thought the book itself was quite marvelous really and I will think about it for a long time.” He responded in the best way possible – by thanking me and suggesting we get together. Basically just listening.
Maybe this is a good time to go back to Radical Hope.
A remembrance from Department of Philosophy faculty member Martha Nussbaum:
Jonathan was a deeply original, radical, important philosopher, and also a fantastic human being. I never was personally close to him, but our paths crossed often ever since 1974 or so, when we first met in England. We shared an intellectual debt to Bernard Williams, and also a deep fondness for Bernard the man. (When Bernard received an honorary degree from our department in 1999 -- while fighting against an eventually terminal cancer -- and I hosted an evening reception, I remember how moved and engaged Jonathan was, and how moved I was by his love of Bernard and his loyalty to him.)
Over the years our paths crossed often, not just in departmental matters but also through our shared board membership in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was the deeply immersed practitioner and I an enthusiastic external supporter. We were partners in commentary: at sessions of the Institute, I commented on drafts of his WISDOM WON THROUGH ILLNESS and he on drafts of my ANGER AND FORGIVENESS. He would push me toward deeper and more subtle engagement with the complexities of the inner world, and I would push him toward acknowledging political forces that co-shape the emotional life. We both learned so much from each other. Later I was honored to be his chosen commentator on IMAGINING THE END, when he presented it at the Seminary Coop, and I am so happy I had that chance to tell him how profoundly important his whole career was -- and is, for it is vibrantly alive.
Beginning with LOVE AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE, Jonathan articulated a new vision of what can be called philosophical psychoanalysis, basically in the Freudian tradition (we argued here too, since my preferred guide is Winnicott) in which love takes center stage, shaping the whole world of the child's attachments. Unlike so many of the great analysts (for example Klein and Winnicott), he was a beautiful writer, clear and eloquent, and this made it possible for him to communicate his vision to a wide public -- for example in his influential 1995 NEW REPUBLIC essay (reprinted in OPEN MINDED) on why Americans have turned away from Freud and why this is a societal loss. This essay becomes ever more timely, as Americans, today even more than then, prefer quick fixes and phony ego-driven narratives and disdain the scary tough work of self-examination.
Jonathan loved the Greeks, and one should never forget that his first book is a brilliant account of the underpinnings of Aristotle's formal logic. In his final book, again, Aristotle makes a key appearance, steering us to a correct understanding of gratitude. Jonathan had a wonderful way of uniting apparently heterogeneous sources of inspiration. He wrote with compression as well as eloquence, so each time I reread him I discover insights I had not reckoned with before. He showed what it was to philosophize with love -- that is, with your entire soul. The last time I saw him in person was at his marvelous Ryerson Lecture in spring 2024, when he bounded and almost bounced across that formal stage with such infectious joy in both thinking and communicating. I was so happy that in that lecture he integrated the bold political vision of RADICAL HOPE with his psychoanalytic account -- all in the light of an Aristotelian understanding of gratitude. Such marvelous intellectual generosity to all who heard him, as to all who read him and will read him for generations to come.
As to his readers, Jonathan was also superbly generous to colleagues and friends. But his deepest love was clearly reserved for his family. Back in the 1990's he talked to me about searching for a great love -- and then, in Gabriel, he found it. It was beautiful to witness their evident mutual devotion -- only made richer by their shared love of Sam (and his ongoing love for Sophia, born from his first marriage). My thoughts are with them in this time of mourning. For all too brief a time, they shared life with a truly wonderful human being.
A remembrance from philosopher Cora Diamond:
Here are a few things about Jonathan Lear.
“Radical Hope” is an amazingly wonderful book. I want to write other things about Jonathan but if I tried to say what is great about “Radical Hope”, I would never get beyond that book, and how it illuminates together human life and the life and history of the Crow people.
Jonathan was a hugely generous person. It was extremely Jonathan to respond immediately to my mentioning a couple of weeks ago that I couldn’t find my copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, that he’d be delighted to get me a replacement copy. (Fortunately, mine turned up.) — Jonathan loved sharing things that he himself loved. An example I will treasure is his having sent me just recently a copy of Yehuda Amichai’s poem, “The Amen Stone”. — A very generous Jonathan thing was his putting together for me a bibliography on psychoanalysis when, knowing nothing about psychoanalysis, I had committed myself to going to the Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Seminar at the Tavistock Clinic. I had no idea how to even begin approaching the topic of psychoanalysis. The bibliography Jonathan generously put together for me was enormously helpful.
One of Jonathan’s most striking abilities was his capacity to enable us to see something deeply familiar in a totally new way. Jonathan’s essay on Gettysburg does this. While we don’t all of us share Jonathan’s experience of having been made to memorize and recite the Gettysburg Address, most people brought up and educated in America are at least somewhat familiar with it. Jonathan utterly changes how we can see the the Address. He lets us see the Confederate unburied dead, present when Lincoln gave the Address, and asks how we might think about their presence, what it means for our present understanding of the Gettysburg Address. I want to emphasize not only how Jonathan enables us to see the Address in a changed way, but that his reconception of the Address comes in part from his having gone to Gettysburg, and having let the place itself shape his imaginative response.
A final word, on Jonathan as cook. Twelve years ago, I landed at O’Hare late on Halloween, and took a taxi to the Lears. The lovely simple dinner Jonathan made was bread that he had made earlier that day, with Coetzee Soup, the bright orange pumpkin soup that Jonathan learned from the time that he and JM Coetzee taught together.
His death is a great loss.
A remembrance from Department of Philosophy alum and Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, Amy Levine:
Jonathan Lear wrote a lot about what it meant to be a student. He was deeply thoughtful about what it meant to inherit a world, with gratitude for its richness and presence, in its fragility and the ways that it fell short. In the chapter on exemplars in Imagining the End, he wrote about the way that an enigmatic remark from his fourth-grade teacher startled him, shook him out of a kind of (age-appropriate) unreflective complacency, and established this teacher as holding for him a set of standards that he now valued and aimed to meet. In A Case for Irony, he described the way that authentic engagement with possible ways of living and acting in our world is in light of their falling short of the ideals that they aim at, and with constant reference to these enigmatic ideals. He also wrote about being a psychoanalyst: about the way that the practice of psychoanalysis can cultivate a certain kind of freedom in the way that the world shows up for you, that it can make rigid habits of interpretation more flexible, that the interpretation that shapes how we live can become a site of play, and at the same time, genuine thoughtfulness and contact with reality. These were not just topics of philosophical investigation for Jonathan; they deeply informed his relationships with his students and what it meant for him to be a teacher.
Jonathan was my dissertation advisor and mentor during my eight years at UChicago, but this significantly understates how much he meant to me. I first got to know Jonathan during the seminar he taught with Matt Boyle, on the imagination. I had read Jonathan’s work as an undergraduate and admired it, but this was the first time I had ever read psychoanalysis seriously, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I got to know him much better in a lecture course he taught the next quarter, on philosophy and psychoanalysis. This class opened up a set of topics and questions for me that I did not know I was allowed to think about as a professional philosopher, that I did not know were open for investigation. More importantly, it opened up a way of thinking about them, with Freud but as tempered by Jonathan’s own rigor, clarity, and matter-of-factness. I immediately dropped everything, which was, at the time, plans to write a dissertation on Kant’s first Critique, to learn as much as I could about psychoanalysis as quickly as possible, and to try to find a way to do philosophical work deeply informed by psychoanalysis in my own voice. I felt an invitation to do this from Jonathan, which I badly needed. I came out of a number of different closets during those early years in graduate school, and the intellectual closet that getting to know Jonathan helped me come out of was not the least of them. He helped me access a kind of freedom that I did not and could not have imagined for myself.
With truly incredible generosity, Jonathan recognized this interest, supported, and encouraged it. He delighted with me in the way that a whole world opened up, and we read together: Freud and Winnicott, some Klein, Kierkegaard. Jonathan had a remarkable ability, which I imagine came in part from his analytic training but was also uniquely his, to find threads of inchoate thought in the things I said and note them with an enigmatic remark or suggestion of something to read, which would intrigue and puzzle me but then turn out to be exactly right, illuminating and generative. One of these moments sent us to Jean Laplanche, who has remained important to my work. He allowed me the great pleasure of helping him get into Franz Rosenzweig.
As I began work on my dissertation, Jonathan held, in his person and in his writing, ideals for doing honest, clear, and rigorous work in philosophy. I felt like my task from him was to ask a question that really, genuinely mattered to me, clarify what that question is, and write as clearly, directly, authentically, even beautifully, and without jargon about it. These ideals stood apart in many ways from what was required of someone by professional philosophy. I fell short of these standards continuously, frustrating myself and I think him too, but was grateful for them and honored by what they asked of me. Jonathan was an honest thinker, and patient. He was always encouraging but asked hard questions. He never hesitated to say when something was good, and clear and honest, or when it was self-deceived, or lazy, or tranquilizing. He held these standards for me, and I am so grateful for the chance, the incentive, to try as hard as I could to meet them, and the time, and grace to fail again and again and again.
Jonathan loved food and cooking. He had a wonderful story about a summer when he was young when he worked as a short-order cook. We asked each other if we had cooked anything interesting recently and he never just wanted to know what I made, but the whole recipe in great detail, and told me the same. We described the steps with precision, as if we would memorize them and go make the recipe. Sometimes we did make the recipes. He told such funny stories when he let himself speak freely in that way with me. He was curious about science and nature and asked me questions as if I knew the answers. I organized an event and did other administrative things for him and his gratitude was sincere and effusive, and I felt warmed by it. Often he wore a suit but he also wore New Balances and drank San Pellegrinos—I will miss seeing him around and thinking of him there, in seminars, around the department, around Hyde Park.
Jonathan wrote often about people, like Kierkegaard, and the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, who never wanted disciples and made it difficult to be one. He made himself their student anyway. I have always felt that Jonathan was saying, with this, that this is how he felt too, what he wanted. He made it difficult to be a disciple because he was so singularly invested in making it easier—required, even—to be yourself. I am his student anyway, and profoundly grateful for that.
A remembrance from philosopher Jonathan Beere:
It is an honor to join in remembering Jonathan Lear, an extraordinary human being and philosopher. I was lucky to know him a little. I first met him through my friend Zena Hitz, who worked with him as a graduate student. Then I knew him as the husband of a friend and as a senior colleague, during my brief but wonderful stint on the faculty at the University of Chicago. I owe a huge debt to his work on Plato, Aristotle and Wittgenstein.
It's very hard to describe him. His extraordinariness was extraordinary in being so understated. I never knew him to put on airs. I never knew him to puff himself up or compete for importance. He seemed at rest in himself, yet not at all complacent. He was full of curiosity about the people around him, but was always respectful of others' inner space. He somehow drew me out and left me alone at the same time. This could be hard to deal with, because I found myself eager to get his attention, in a weird way. He seemed to be completely honest, both about and to both himself and others. This managed strangely to be simultaneously reassuring and unsettling.
In an odd turn of events, I sang sheva brachot -- the seven traditional Jewish blessings over the bride and groom -- at his wedding. This was a great and unique honor, which I strove to live up to. It did not reflect any Jewish authority of mine, but I was friends with Gabriel and thus Jonathan came to know me as an inquiring Jewish person who felt both tied to and unsettled by the Jewish tradition. It seemed to me that we were, in that way, similar in our relations to the Jewish tradition.
When I took up my position in the department at the University of Chicago, I moved to Chicago from Berlin, together with my wife and infant daughter, a few weeks before the academic year began. Due to difficulties with customs, all of our furniture and personal effects were in transit for a long time. We were stuck in a completely unfurnished apartment, which posed special difficulties with an infant. Jonathan loaned us the couch from his office -- the one his patients lay on during psychoanalysis -- and we used it for a couple of months, occasionally chuckling over its symbolic significance. I can't say that it prompted any great psychological insights, but it was a huge help! I learned during that time that he could make a terrific dry martini, and that he took pleasure in making them for his guests.
While we were colleagues, he sent me his work in progress and asked for comments, although I was more than 20 years his junior. At the time, I felt overwhelmed by it; I couldn't possibly have anything to say that would be helpful to him. It was paralyzing. In retrospect, I think this attitude did me an injustice but also that he could have turned any feedback of mine into something useful. More than that, the way he sought my feedback exemplified the openness and respect with which he treated people.
During those early days at Chicago, in my first job after graduate school, I struggled with a situation concerning a graduate student whose work I did not think was very good. My low opinion was liable to have serious consequences for the student's future, and I couldn't bear the oppressive sense of responsibility for those consequences. He encouraged me not to think of myself as solely responsible and also not as the final judge of the student's ability, but rather merely to think that I had a responsibility to be honest about how I saw the student. "It's just one man's opinion," he said, about my opinion -- no more, no less. This was what I needed to hear.
As I struggled to fill the role that I had suddenly been given, after years of working towards that very goal, he told me about his own similar struggles years before. Getting the job at Cambridge straight out of graduate school had plunged him into a crisis, he said, because he felt so sharply that he had not done anything to deserve the job and needed to earn it, as it were, retrospectively. This did not solve my problem, but it helped me to see what my problem was.
After leaving Chicago for Berlin, I saw him only a handful of times. But I thought of him often, often with the question how I might get into philosophical conversation with him. Various questions that he raised for me over the years have stuck with me indelibly. I wanted to learn more from and with him. It was good to know that those conversations could still happen. Now, they won't, they can't happen. It's a great, great loss. May his memory be for a blessing.
The Committee on Social Thought website has a page remembering Jonathan with many podcasts, interviews, videos, and other links
Here is the obituary from the University of Chicago
Here is the obituary in the New York Times
Here is an obituary (in German) in Die Zeit
Here is an obituary from the Hyde Park Herald
Here are a series of reminiscences in The Point Magazine
Howard Stein died peacefully at his home in Hyde Park on Friday, March 8, 2024, at the age of 95. Howard was a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago from 1953 to 1960. He subsequently taught at Brandeis University, Case Western Reserve University, Rockefeller University, and Columbia University. In the 1960s he also worked for several years for Honeywell as a mathematician and engineer. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1980, retiring in 2000. Howard was a National Science Foundation Science Faculty Fellow in 1958-59. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974. In 1989 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Howard’s 1967 paper, "Newtonian Space Time," inaugurated the modern study of the foundations of physics. Philosophers of science had been concerned with physical theories before but Howard’s mathematical, historical and conceptual analysis of Newtonian and, in 1968, Einstein-Minkowski spacetime in terms of modern geometry set a new standard of scholarship. By the 1990s there was a thriving community of self-identified philosophers of physics concerned with the problems and approaches to physical theory that Howard had originated in the 1960s. The international Society for the Philosophy of Physics was founded to serve this community.
Howard was remarkable for his equal dedication to the history of philosophy and to the history of physics, as well as for his compelling writing style. He was deeply interested in the historical origins of concepts and theories from physics. This led him not only to early modern natural philosophers such as Descartes and Newton, but also to Plato. A remark from one of his papers captures something of Howard’s philosophical character: he describes Descartes as "a thinker who is one of my favorites for instructive foolishness.”
Howard’s pre-eminence in the field may not have been entirely evident to those outside it since he did not publish all of his work. A conference in 2017 brought together philosophers of physics who had been influenced by Howard. It resulted in a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics in 2019.
Howard had the unique philosophical capacity to turn into gold whatever topic he worked on. From the papers on Newton to the papers on Carnap to the papers on realism, he always managed to cast new and fresh light on old problems and to make us see them from a different and novel point of view. His ability to combine solid philosophical argument with historical accuracy and detail was unparalleled. Thanks to him we have come to re-think, among other areas, Newton’s method and its relation to metaphysics; Poincare’s conventions; and the Carnap-Quine debate about analyticity.
Apart from his seminal writings on the foundations of physics and its history, and especially Newton, there was Howard’s amazing breadth of knowledge of everything—from the Greeks to Milton to contemporary politics to music and its history—and his brute intelligence. This intelligence, his ability to listen, absorb, and then, simply out of deep determination to understand what was being said, to raise the most probing critical questions—this character trait was most manifest in his questions at colloquia. Howard’s questions were never clever “objections,” but rather an expression of his commitment to knowledge and comprehension. No topic lay beyond his curiosity and no opinion, text, or communication—from colleague’s writings to student questions to menus to Times editorials—were beneath his critical reflection. Wonderful examples of Howard’s breadth and depth—and the elegance of his writing—are two letters he wrote in response to reviews in the New York Review of Books.
Howard and recently deceased Professor of Philosophy Bill Tait were great friends and Philosophy Department colleagues for decades. They were born one day apart and died within a week of each other.
William W. (Bill) Tait, one of the most distinguished philosophers of mathematics in the second half of the 20th century, died in Naperville, Illinois, on March 15, 2024, at the age of 95.
Born on January 22, 1929, Bill Tait graduated from Lehigh University in 1952 and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1958. He began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1972, retiring in 1996. Earlier, he taught at Stanford University (1958-64), the University of Illinois-Chicago (1965-71), and Aarhus University (1971-72). He was Department of Philosophy chair from 1981 to 1987. After retirement, he stayed active with his research, including giving the prestigious Skolem Lectures and Tarski Lectures. He was a central figure in a group of faculty—including David Malament, Howard Stein, Ian Mueller, Bill Wimsatt, and Leonard Linsky—who made Chicago the place to study the philosophy and history of physics and mathematics, logic, biology, and figures like Frege and Russell. In 2002, Bill was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Bill was a central contributor to the development of proof theory, and so also to logic and the philosophy of mathematics. He provided an original study of functionals of transfinite type, with results that later found application in combinatory logic and the lambda calculus. Eventually, he moved to considering the philosophical aspects of the constructivist means used in such work. A well-known outcome was his article “Finitism” (1981), in which he argued for an understanding of Hilbertian finitism in terms of primitive recursive arithmetic.
Bill also made important and widely recognized contributions to our understanding of the relationship between classical and constructive reasoning in mathematics, with additional work on set theory (large cardinals, reflection principles) and constructive type theory (building on Curry-Howard type theory).
From the 1980s on, Bill combined such work with carefully historical-philosophical studies of main figures in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, most notably Georg Cantor, Ernst Zermelo, and Kurt Gödel. During this period he was also involved in broader philosophical debates, engaging with the writings of Frege and Wittgenstein on the historical side, and with Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke, and John McDowell on the contemporary side. In these contexts, Bill made lasting contributions to both the history of the philosophy of mathematics and the history of analytic philosophy. Bill’s interests also went deeper into the history of philosophy. He published on Kant and on Plato, seeing them as important predecessors in the philosophy of mathematics.
Bill was an avid climber, a marvelous colleague, and always had a twinkle in his eye. But his sweetness was coupled with a fierce moral determination that made him, as Chair, a lion on behalf of the department and its faculty and a colossal pain to the administration.
Bill and recently deceased Professor of Philosophy Howard Stein were great friends and Philosophy Department colleagues for decades. They were born one day apart and died within a week of each other.