I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.

I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else.

I was all of 21 at the time, so I’m sure they were. I later took Ameriks’s seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a topic that evoked an a priori combination of anticipation and dread–except that I ended up, a posteriori, enjoying it more than I thought I would. Hegel’s discussion of the master-slave dialectic added something valuable to my understanding of Aristotle’s theory of friendship, and put Sartre’s discussion of bad faith in useful context. It was less crazy than I’d been led to believe.

I took Ameriks’s Hegel class around the time of the quasi-Hegelian “End of History” fad associated with Francis Fukuyama & Co. Ameriks made a point of discussing Fukuyama’s thesis, very briefly, in class. As with my class notes, I think Ameriks found Fukuyama more amusing than anything else, suggesting in a sort of offhand way that Fukuyama’s thesis would be refuted well before “the end of history.” Amusingly enough, that turned out to be right.

Later in life, I started to take Kant more seriously than I previously had, and went back to Ameriks’s work to help get myself oriented. I’m not sure whether what I found was a gold mine or a mine field, but either way, the exercise made me glad to have worked with Ameriks, however briefly and superficially. He was a scholar’s scholar, and while I’m no scholar myself, it’s always salutary to spend some time with someone who is.

Ameriks had no reason to remember me, but gave me ample reason to remember him. The time I spent studying Hegel in his seminar belongs to my Footloose Grad School Era: I’d drive out to Potato Creek State Park to commune with the Geist in the Indiana woods, drive home listening to Collective Soul when I got tired of it, and look forward to my ethereal session with Ameriks the next day in the hopes of making sense of it all. It was a charmed life, and Ameriks was part of the charm. I miss it. I’ll miss him. My condolences to friends and family.