My dissertation advisor and grad school mentor, William David Solomon (he went by “David”), died this past Wednesday, February 26th. He was 81. I learned a great deal from him, and regret that we hadn’t spoken in over a decade. 

He became my advisor somewhat by accident. I went to Notre Dame primarily to study with Alasdair MacIntyre, which I did for several years, until MacIntyre left Notre Dame for Duke. At that point, I had to change advisors and dissertation topic. I’d originally thought to write a dissertation on Aristotle, but ended up writing one on the connections between epistemic foundationalism and the project of finding a ‘foundation’ for ethics. It was an unusual topic, and many people didn’t ‘get’ it. Solomon by contrast was enormously enthusiastic about and supportive of the project (and of me), and let me write it my way. 

My dissertation was sabotaged at the last minute–at the defense–by a faculty member who tried to sink the project on essentially procedural grounds. Solomon’s intervention saved the project, saved my degree, and saved my career–for as long as it lasted, anyway. That’s a lot to owe to one person.

But the truth is, most of what I owe him can’t be enumerated in so straightforward a fashion. 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. I ended up learning more about Catholic social teaching and the American-Catholic milieu from this Baptist with a Jewish name than from any of the Catholics I knew. He himself converted to Catholicism this past May.

He taught just the way he spoke. He’d assign a reading–Anscombe, Hare, Kant– then amble into class without notes or an outline, and start up a conversation about it. That makes it sound as though he was unprepared, but he was always prepared. He knew, better than most, that philosophy is a fundamentally conversational activity that starts and ends in medias res. The class would then proceed in a conversational way, at a conversational pace. There was no “lesson plan,” no “learning objectives,” and no attempt to teach to the imperatives of bean counting. Every class was as much a class on Anscombe or Hare or Kant as a masterclass on pedagogy.

David Solomon at Notre Dame (photo credit: Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture)

Now that I’ve been kicked out of higher education, I spend a lot of time trying to reconstruct what I did while I was in it. One of the things was something I learned in great measure from Solomon. He was Exhibit A for the pedagogical mean to be observed between the extremes of indoctrination and wholesale neutrality. He managed to combine candid partisanship about whatever he was teaching with scrupulous fairness. It was obvious that he sided with, say, Aristotle and Aquinas over Kant, or MacIntyre over Rawls, or Foot and Anscombe over Hare. It was also obvious why. 

But he grasped better than most that having that set of commitments entailed actually knowing Kant, Rawls, and Hare rather than setting up and knocking down strawmen fashioned in their image. That became the essential epistemic contrast between my graduate school career and the Objectivist-libertarian milieu I simultaneously inhabited. Most of my graduate school mentors, Solomon very much included, practiced a real commitment to truth. Most of the Objectivists I knew (and know) talked a great game about it, but no more than that. Solomon may have been a partisan, but it was obvious from dealing with him–decades of conversations, in my case–that he had zero interest in railroading you into his position. Either you were convinced, or you weren’t. If you weren’t, well, so much the worse for you. 

He had a sense of humor born of reflexive (by which I mean unreflective) candor. He would say things you “weren’t supposed to say,” because he’d never cultivated the habit of remembering that you weren’t supposed to say them. He once invited me to his office to discuss a paper I’d written on the premise that it might be developed for publication. When he failed to show up on the appointed day, he apologized for missing the appointment, but then pointed out that he’d re-read the paper, “and honestly, it wasn’t that good” (and it wasn’t). I sent him the manuscript of my dissertation in October 2006. When I asked him near the end of 2007 if he’d read it, he said he hadn’t. When I asked him why, he said, “I just haven’t.” Hard to argue with that. I’ll never forget his describing one of our colleagues as “ignorant as a hog,” a claim which, however rebarbative, was laugh-out-loud funny, and in the case at hand, 100% true. That kind of candor was rare, not just in academia, but everywhere else I went. So was that kind of humor. That may in fact have been our deepest bond. 

In May 2014, I was invited to a Festschrift conference at Notre Dame in honor of Solomon. I gave a paper there on what is probably his most influential paper, “Internal and External Objections to Virtue Ethics” (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13 [1988]). True to form, I wrote an all-out critique that was so brusque that one of the readers who reviewed the manuscript for publication called it “disrespectful.” I actually did tone it down for publication, but Solomon loved it just the way I gave it. Maybe he just loved the sustained attention lavished on his paper, including the parts that accused him of committing textbook fallacies, or of not understanding Plato and Aristotle etc., but in any case, he seemed genuinely pleased.

It ends with this paragraph, which still seems apt. 

As it happens, Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” was the first piece of philosophy I read as a graduate student at Notre Dame–in Solomon’s seminar on twentieth-century ethics, a seminar in which his legendary generosity, tolerance, openness, geniality, and patience were always in vivid operation. The seminar was a formative, memorable intellectual experience, one that I take as a standard in my own teaching to this day. I was at the time a callow, ill-informed, ill-educated Ayn Rand-intoxicated philosophical bigot, and twentieth century ethics seemed to me a morass of pointless, uninteresting confusion. I doubt that anyone but David Solomon could in that state have made Moore, Prichard, Ross, or Hare seem interesting to me. In consequence, I’m happy to say that twentieth-century ethics now seems a morass of pointless, interesting confusion. That may seem to some a distinction without a difference, but it has for me meant that difference between perpetual alienation and authentic engagement, something to be grateful for–a lot to be grateful for. I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to say that at last to my own philosophical benefactor, the gift of a self-centered person to a self-abnegating one, but mutually beneficial, I hope, all the same (“David Solomon on Egoism and Virtue,” in Raymond Hain ed., Beyond the Self: Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Culture, Essays in Honor of W. David Solomon, p. 147). 

The conference banquet was the last time I saw him. He suffered a stroke soon after that, and was inaccessible for a long time due to his prolonged illness. Eventually, I got caught up in the minutiae of my own life, and lost touch with him. My deepest condolences to his friends and family. He was well loved and will be greatly missed.

Some memorial notices I found online: by Kenneth Hallenius at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, by Michael New at National Review; by Jonathan Liedl at the National Catholic Register; by Christian Miller on X. Here’s an earlier tribute, from 2016, by Fr Wilson Miscamble, CSC, in The Irish Rover.