Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Allan Gotthelf passes on

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

Allan Gotthelf has died:

 

http://www.aynrandsociety.org/allangotthelf

 

Allan Gotthelf :  

 

 

Hermann Hesse’s Demian […] one line in that book moved me profoundly, and I have carried it with me to this day.  The novel’s protagonist asks Demian’s mother how one can thank someone who has provided one with a depth of philosophical insight that can never be repaid.

 

She answered:  You can pass it on."

 

Some of what he has passed on:

 

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-author=Allan%20Gotthelf&page=1&rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AAllan%20Gotthelf

Edited by intellectualammo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am surprised by this, but more in the sense that I met him less than a year ago, and planned to take one of his classes. I really wanted to learn from him directly, but now that opportunity is gone. One word I'd use to describe him: wise.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Allan Gotthelf (December 30, 1942 – August 30, 2013)

 

Fond memories of Allan, with highest esteem and appreciation. His written works,* and the younger generation of scholars he assisted, will continue to expand my understanding.

 

From the festschrift for him, Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle (2010):

Allan Gotthelf was born in Brooklyn during the glory years of the Brooklyn Dodgers—he recalls attending games at Ebbets Field, once watching Jackie Robinson (who joined the Dodgers’ roster in 1947) steal home, and forming an informal “Gill Hodges Fan Club” with two friends. But as passionate as he was for sports, his true love was understanding things at the deepest level, and after doing three years of junior high school in two he attended the justly famous Stuyvesant High School, with its rigorous training in mathematics and science, from 1956 to 1959. . . .

 

Prior to discovering philosophy, Allan focused his thirst for understanding on mathematics and physics, and in 1959, at the age of sixteen, he entered Brooklyn College, intending to major in physics, but shifting after he arrived toward theoretical mathematics. During the summer of 1961 he read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which influenced him to redirect his intellectual focus toward philosophy. He graduated in 1963 with a Major in Mathematics and a Minor in Philosophy, having taken classes in philosophy with Martin Lean and John Hospers. Though he had decided to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy, he had a strong interest in philosophy of mathematics and had already accepted a graduate assistantship at Penn State in mathematics. So after completing his MA in mathematics there in one year, he entered the graduate program in philosophy at Columbia University in 1964.

 

. . . He eventually settled on “Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality” as the topic for his dissertation, and received his Ph.D. in 1975. An essay based on his dissertation won the dissertation essay prize of the Review of Metaphysics and was published in its 1976/7 volume. . . .

 

 

From his Preface to Teleology, First Principles, and Scientificå Method in Aristotle’s Biology (2012):

In 1961, midway through my undergraduate studies, I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I loved the novel. It glowed with respect for the mind, and for much else that I valued or came to value. Rand loved Aristotle, and that love permeated especially her later writings, from Atlas Shrugged on. . . .

 

I started reading Aristotle myself and found much of profound value philosophically, certainly more than I had found in the contemporary philosophy materials I studied for my regular courses. I had been fortunate to meet and get to know Rand, and I talked with her about Aristotle (and much else) on and off over the next fifteen or so years. Two ideas I would like to highlight here that attracted me to Aristotle from the beginning (in the first case, with the help of Rand’s own discussion of the issues) were: (i) an understanding of causality and explanation in terms not of events and laws but of things with natures and potentials; and (ii) the idea that developed human knowledge takes the form of axiomatically structured bodies of understanding, which reflect a grasp of the essential natures and potentials of the relevant things (including their attributes), a grasp acquired through systematic sensory observation and a broadly inductive methodology.

 

And so began an adventure . . . .

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Notice from Harry Binswanger *


It is with extreme sadness that I must report that yesterday Allan Gotthelf passed away. He had fought off cancer for some 17 years, but earlier this summer it became clear that the cancer had reached a point of no return. After several weeks of progressive decline, he died peacefully in his apartment, attended by nurses and his beloved friend, Cass Love—who did truly heroic work in attending to and caring for Allan in his final months.

 

Allan was a close friend for almost 50 years. We roomed together for a year while we were both philosophy graduate students at Columbia, and we continued as both friends and intellectual allies ever since. I have many delightful memories of Allan’s warm, benevolent, twinkle-in-the-eye personality. I may share some stories at another time; in this sad hour, I want to pay tribute to Allan for his character virtues.

 

First, and above all, Allan was a thinker, a philosopher. He not only taught philosophy, wrote philosophy, and read philosophy, he lived and breathed philosophy. His two gods were Ayn Rand and Aristotle, and he has made important, lasting contributions to the literature on each.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One of my professors of thermodynamics in engineering, an Iranian guy, would say as he introduced a new concept and how it is put to work “Now I want you to think real good with me.” I list pages here of some good such moments (1969–71) between Rand, Gotthelf (B ), and Peikoff (E), transcribed in the Appendix of ITOE:

 

207–8, 212–15, 240–244, 248–51, 260–63, 268–79.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Peikoff – In the development of the human race philosophically, the three axiomatic concepts were explicitly grasped for the first time at definitely different periods of history and in a definite order: “existence” by Parmenides, “identity” by Aristotle, and “consciousness,” as far as I know, not until Augustine.

 

Rand – Why would you say not until Augustine?

 

Peikoff – I don’t think there was any actual concept of “consciousness” in Greek philosophy.

 

Rand – But what of Aristotle’s psychology, with the concept of “soul” as consciousness?

 

Peikoff – Yes, but “soul” as he used it is more of a biological concept than a mental one.

 

Gotthelf – Aristotle has “thinking,” he has “feeling,” he has “imagining,” but he doesn’t seem to have “consciousness” as an integration of those. The next level of abstraction for him is “soul,” which applies to all living things qua living.

 

Rand – You mean Augustine was the first to isolate “consciousness” as a concept in the Cartesian sense?

 

Peikoff – Yes. “Si falor, sum.”

 

Rand – Oh, that’s interesting.

 

Peikoff – The human race developed the three axioms in the right order.

 

Gotthelf – Good for us!

 

(262–63)

 

 

I’d quibble over Augustine, looking into his Greek philosophic roots, but the moment remains the light and lightness it was.

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Plas,

I believe the book you are thinking of is Concepts, Induction, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, due out next year. Gotthelf was co-editing it with Richard Burian. Perhaps this book will come to be issued. It was planned to consist of papers largely from a workshop Gotthelf organized in Pittsburgh in 2010. I don't know if there was a contribution from John McCaskey to that workshop. 

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

From The Times, Trenton:

 

Philosopher Allan Stanley Gotthelf died of cancer at age 70 on Friday, Aug. 30, at his home in Philadelphia, in the company of his dear friend Cassandra Love. A memorial service will be held Saturday, Sept. 7, at 10 a.m. at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, NY; burial will be at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, NY, at 3 p.m. He is survived by Ronald and Cassandra Love, and their sons Zach and Ian Barber (whom Allan regarded as his family), by his many friends and students, and by his sister, Joan Gotthelf Price. 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From The New York Times:

 

David Charles (Oxford University) speaks of Gotthelf's "decisive role in the renaissance of scholarly and philosophical interest in Aristotle's biological writings," and Alan Code (Stanford University) comments that "no scholar has had a deeper and more lasting impact on the scholarly understanding of Aristotle's biological corpus than Allan Gotthelf." Gotthelf made this impact through a series of path-breaking essays now collected in Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Biology (Oxford University Press, 2012) and through the conferences and workshops he organized. These events formed the basis for two books: Philosophical Issues In Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1987), which Gotthelf co-edited with James G. Lennox (The University of Pittsburgh), and Aristotle on Nature and Living Things (Mathesis, 1985). The latter book, which Gotthelf edited, was in honor of his friend and mentor David Balme (University of London), and after Balme's death in 1989, Gotthelf shepherded several of his projects to publication. In 2004, Gotthelf's "contributions to the study of classical philosophy and science" were celebrated at a conference at the University of Pittsburgh, which led to the volume: Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf (Cambridge University Press, 2010), edited by Lennox and Robert Bolton (Rutgers University). Gotthelf met Ayn Rand in 1962, in connection with lectures on her philosophy that he attended. Rand took an active interest in philosophy students, and over the next 15 years, he had the opportunity for long philosophical discussions with her. Gotthelf is one of two friends whose expressions of interest Rand said prompted her to write Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which has become one of history's best-selling works on epistemology. Gotthelf was an active participant in Rand's famous 1969-71 Workshops on that book, an edited transcript of which now appears as an appendix to the book's second edition (Plume, 1990). Gotthelf was a founding member of the Ayn Rand Society, a group affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, and he held the Society's highest office from 1990 until his death. Since April of 2013, he has shared that office with Gregory Salmieri (Boston University), his former student and frequent collaborator. Gotthelf co-edited (with Lennox), and contributed essays to, the first two volumes of the Society's ongoing Philosophical Studies series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the author of On Ayn Rand (Wadsworth, 2000), and is co-editor (with Salmieri) of Ayn Rand: A Companion to Her Works and Thought (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming). 

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Notice at Classics, Philosophy, and Ancient Science at University of Pittsburgh:

It is with deep sadness that we report the passing of our friend and former colleague Allan Gotthelf on August 30th, 2013 at his home in Philadelphia. After taking early retirement from The College of New Jersey, Allan spent a year visiting at University of Texas, Austin, and then, supported by a fellowship from the Anthem Foundation for the Study of Objectivism, he became a Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science here in 2003, a position he held until 2012, when he was appointed Anthem Foundation Distinguished Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University, the position he held at the time of his death. While in Pittsburgh he taught or co-taught many graduate seminars on Aristotle, served on a number of doctoral committees, played a central role as a member of the Classics, Philosophy, and Ancient Science Program and organized a wide variety of workshops and conferences focused on Ancient Philosophy and Science and Epistemology. He will be missed as a scholar, teacher, and organizer, but no less as a warm, enthusiastic, and generous colleague and friend.

 

 

The full biographical sketch (excerpted in #4) that appeared in Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle, a festschrift (2010) in honor of Allan Gotthelf, can presently be read here.

 

From James Lennox, on his association with Allan Gotthelf:

Allan and I first met in 1970 when I was an undergraduate Philosophy major at York University in Toronto. I had just completed an honors thesis on Aristotle's De Anima, and a mutual friend arranged a meeting so that I could discuss my interest both in Aristotle and in Ayn Rand with Allan. He recognized my passion for Aristotle and for philosophy and was enormously generous and encouraging, then and all through my graduate school years at the University of Toronto. I eventually chose to write my dissertation on the relationship between Aristotle's Metaphysics and his biological writings, and Allan, who was working on a dissertation on Aristotle's teleology, introduced me to David Balme and encouraged me to ask Balme to be my external reader. From the time that I graduated (1978) and began my career in the Department of HPS in Pittsburgh, Allan played a valuable mentoring role, involving me in conferences he organized and inviting me to join him in editing the groundbreaking collection Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge 1987). Allan, my daughter, and I shared an apartment in Cambridge in 1987 as we completed the editing of that volume. From then until the month before his death, Allan and I were continuously collaborating on projects related both to Aristotelian studies and to advancing scholarly interest in Objectivism. Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge, volume 2 of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series of which we were co-editors, was published just a few months before Allan passed away. And the last work-related conversation he and I had concerned projects on which we were collaborating and which Allan knew he would not be able to see to fruition. Even in those last months, he was optimistically looking forward, thinking about how those projects could go forward without him.

 

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...