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A longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Haverford College, Professor Kosman also taught as a visiting professor at several leading PhD programs. He was well-known for his contributions to scholarship on ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle. The Haverford memorial notice is here.
A great loss. He was one of my favorite ancient philosophers. Everything that he wrote was significant, provocative, and distinctly his own: witty without triviality, profound without pomposity. He was even better in person.
I'm very sorry to learn of Aryeh Kosman's death. I got to know him through conferences and his teaching stints at the University of Chicago after his retirement from Haverford. He was a warm and generous presence, and I had great fun trying out some of the ideas in my dissertation on him. What I remember most clearly was his sense of wonder, at the world, at the marvel of human life (especially at an advanced age), and at the prospect of spending time thinking about the ideas of Plato and Aristotle with others. I make use of a number of his essays often, especially "Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle's Ethics" [1980] and "Virtues of Thought", the title essay of his 2014 collection.
I was at Haverford in 1978-82. Philosophy majors were introduced to the discipline by a year-long course in the History of Philosophy taught by all the members of the brilliant department Haverford had at that time (Richard Bernstein, Aryeh Kosman, Paul Desjardins, Ashok Gangadean, Kathleen Wright). I was in Bernstein's section, and was mesmerized by his energetic and inspiring teaching. I eventually took Aryeh's Aristotle course, but remember very little of it. I did have one-on-one interactions with him at the time, but nothing special. Even when Aryeh later visited for one semester at Pittsburgh, my meetings with him there weren't very memorable.
However, many, many years later, as a philosophy professor at a liberal arts college myself, I came upon his recorded lectures, "The Birth of Western Philosophy: Plato and Aristotle" and was stunned. They were decidedly idiosyncratic interpretations of the Charmides, the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Republic, and of the main branches of Aristotle's system: profound, unorthodox, thought-provoking, refreshing, utterly compelling. I had taught these texts myself (along with Aryeh's definitive accounts of Aristotle on motion and perception), but the lectures gave me the humbling sense of never having taken those texts very seriously before. I listened to his lectures many times, and was unfailingly captivated by the warm and humorous voice, the informal but refined literacy, the synoptic vision guiding every detail, the flights into philosophical fantasy that were always grounded in a sure and superb grasp of the texts and their interpretive traditions. I felt I had returned to Haverford, to my introduction to philosophy, and understood it for the first time.
I was sorely tempted again and again to reach out to Aryeh to thank him, but somehow never got around to it. This news saddens me the more for the regret adding bitterness to the loss.
When he was visiting at UCLA in the late 1970's he told a story about how a student had once commented on how impressed he was that when asked a question in class Kosman had stood at the podium, head in hands for several minutes in silence, before finally answering the question. The student was moved by how seriously he had taken the question of an undergraduate. Then Aryeh confessed to us that it was his narcolepsy that had led him to temporarily fall asleep!
One of my first philosophy teachers was a student at Haverford in the mid-late 1960's. He told the story that he and Kosman were endlessly arguing in class about the interpretation of texts. Finally, my teacher said, "Kosman, we'll never agree. Let's take this outside." So the class went outside, and Kosman and my former teacher staged a High Noon-type showdown, walking slowly towards each other, pulling out their finger (pretend-) guns, and 'shooting' each other down. I'm not sure whether this disproves or proves the claim that fundamental philosophical disputes are irresolvable.
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