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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

In Memoriam: Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPTEMBER 6–UPDATE

Professor Shoemaker, who spent almost his entire career at Cornell University, was a leading figure in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, who trained many well-known philosophers including Richard Moran (Harvard), Susanna Siegel (Harvard), and Alan Sidelle (Wisconsin), among others.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Shoemaker.

(Thanks to Brian Ogilvie for the information.)

UPDATE:  Comments are now open, my apologies.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  The Cornell Department's memorial notice is here, and the University's memorial notice here.  (Thanks to Carl Ginet for the pointer.)

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19 responses to “In Memoriam: Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022)”

  1. Richard Moran

    I just learned that the beautiful Sydney Shoemaker has died at the age of 90. He was the reason I wanted to go to Cornell for graduate study and he was the most wonderful adviser I could have imagined. Apart from his brilliance and clarity of thought, he was always responsive and encouraging to whatever I was doing. He was the opposite of an adviser who insists that you conform to their particular way of seeing the problems. With him I always felt that precious combination of freedom, guidance and encouragement that anyone needs to flourish in graduate school. With him it simply came naturally, and was part of his utter lack of vanity. By the time I got to Cornell Sydney had already been a legend in that department for many years and had everyone's deep respect and admiration. But he himself was almost diffident in his self-presentation, which made the forcefulness of his spoken thought (in teaching or colloquia or conversation) all the more impressive. It was a memorable experience to *watch* him think, when he had to pause, sometimes in the middle of a lecture. You could see the beauty of his desire to get things right, the effort it took to get past some difficulty, and the movement of the powerful mind behind it all. I learned so much from him. He was a warm and wonderful friend then and for long after my time at Cornell. I miss him terribly.

    Reply
  2. John Fischer

    Sydney was not flashy and certainly not a "self-promoter." Much more importantly, he was an extremely humble and gentle person, and a very sophisticated, insightful, and productive philosopher. He was one of the reasons Cornell was such a supportive and collegial philosophical community when I was fortunate enough to be a graduate student there. (It has managed to maintain this character over the years, and is that way now.) In my own case, he was on my PhD committee and offered constructive and extremely helpful comments. Indeed, I greatly benefited from his suggestions at the oral defense of my dissertation, relying on them (with attribution!) in my subsequent work. He never just tried to "score points" or knock a student down, but that didn't mean he didn't have sharp critiques. They were however always accompanied by strategies for making one's work better. In contrast to the many "sharks" who swim in the waters of professional philosophy, Sydney was a very kind person. I am deeply grateful to all he gave to us at Cornell, and to me as a young untenured philosopher trying to make my way at a not-so-friendly Yale and a highly competitive academic world.

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  3. Jessica Wilson

    'Time without Change' was one of the first metaphysics papers I ever read; it blew me away and sealed my fate. When I got into Cornell, I was over the moon thinking that I'd be able to study with the great Shoemaker. He didn't disappoint, of course. What a mind! Brilliant, meticulous, and awfully shy (I had to blather on for the first few minutes of every meeting until he could get into the swing of things), he inexorably zeroed in on the heart of the matter, whatever the topic at hand. His contributions to metaphysics and mind are legend. Here's to the memory of a truly profound philosopher… and may there be a too-little red scooter waiting for him on the other side.

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  4. Matt Lister

    Although I never met Shoemaker, I of course admired his work. But as a philosopher from Idaho I always felt an affection for him since he was, almost certainly, the most successful and important philosopher from Idaho (and my home town of Boise.) (There are some other very good philosophers from Idaho, and I'm…somewhere down on the list.) While it's perhaps not as surprising as finding out that Matthew Barney or David Lynch also grew up in Boise, it was still a pleasant surprise to learn this about Shoemaker.

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  5. Marc Lange

    Professor Shoemaker did me a great favor many years ago, without even knowing it. I was glad to have had the opportunity to thank him personally some years later, speaking with him after he gave a talk. He did me this valuable favor in spring 1984, when I was a Princeton junior majoring in physics but unhappy about it. I decided, after a great deal of hesitation, to switch into philosophy. I had taken quite a few philosophy courses, but according to the rules, it was by then far too late to switch majors. However, once having made my decision, I pressed ahead. First I had to get the signature of the philosophy DUS, the redoubtable James Ward Smith, who responded icily, "You want to switch majors NOW???" (He was a bit friendlier after he saw my philosophy grades.) Then I had to get the physics DUS to sign off. He was a notable particle-accelerator experimentalist, and I expected another hard time. After all, I was trying to switch into philosophy of all things. But instead, he heard me out, signed my little official card, and replied, "Philosophy, eh? Great stuff. My brother is a philosophy professor at Cornell." The physicist was Frank Shoemaker, indeed Sydney Shoemaker's brother. (All five Shoemaker siblings received PhDs.) Then I had to go to the Dean's office and burst into tears before the powers-that-be allowed me to switch majors.

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  6. Matthew Kramer

    I had not heard of Sydney Shoemaker before I went to Cornell as an undergraduate in 1977, but I quickly became familiar with him after I arrived. He was an exhilarating teacher, a dazzlingly impressive philosopher, and a thoroughly humane person. Though his main areas of philosophy were different from mine, he and I remained in touch for several years after I had graduated from Cornell, and he was always able to provide valuable comments on the topics that I was addressing. I will remember him fondly.

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  7. Alan Sidelle

    There was something ageless about Sydney. It is not quite that he was like an older man when he was younger – he just had a sort of timeless presence, a temporal analogue to androgyny. Anyway, Dick Moran has put it beautifully and accurately. While Sydney was, and is, a towering figure in philosophy of mind and the metaphysics of properties, I wonder if he would have been even more so if not for, as Dick puts it, his natural diffidence. There was nothing self-promoting about Sydney, all the while he was producing entirely original and widely influential work. While we used to joke about the fact that Sydney’s seminar style (and Carl's, too) was to write a paper and then read it – what is not a joke is that he would write a paper every week. And of course, they were all eminently worth listening to, illuminated the readings and the issues, and were provocative and often contained the germs of ideas that he would later publish. It was a privilege to be in on ground zero. And as Kadri Vihvelin humorously noted in another thread, if you bent over to pick up a pen you had dropped, you would likely have missed a crucial step in the argument. His arguments were often very intricate, not 3-steppers where each premise is intuitively clear. He wasn’t baroque – but he saw and developed difficult connections, and wanted to nail everything down as much as possible. His work connecting functionalism and psychological theories of personal identity was an excellent example of this, as was his work on functionalism and qualia.
    Another feature that perhaps slightly had Sydney slightly less towering than he perhaps should be (though at 6”2’, that was fairly towering) was a general sort of laid back presentation, and not being prone to jumping to off-the-head pronouncements in response to interesting or challenging questions. He was not as ‘quick’ in that way as some other famous philosophers – but you could count on him having something very useful to say once he had his time to think about it and chew it over. That said, I agree with Dick that often, you could see him thinking – and this was easier in a seminar setting than a public lecture, and this was some of the best training in philosophy.
    It was some years after leaving Cornell that I realized Sydney’s influence on my own work, especially methodologically. While there are hazards in using epistemological considerations to tackle metaphysical issues, Sydney regularly did so in ways that skirted worries about positivism or verificationism, and he did so with great insight. I can’t lay claim to doing so with great insight, but I do suspect this angle on metaphysical issues played a formative role in some of my approach.
    Another thing Dick has just right was Sydney’s ‘freedom. guidance and encouragement’. I was never quite sure, when writing a paper – or my dissertation – or just talking – whether, or to what extent, Sydney agreed with what I was arguing. He just pressed in interesting places and made you think you should keep working on it (unless he had some devastating objection, which was sometimes) and was, of course, excellent at seeing what you needed to do to make it better. He was a sort of ‘hands off’ advisor – as I have subsequently been – but he was there and eager when you were ready, and was by far more helpful and constructive than I have ever been or hope to be. It eventually became pretty clear to me that Sydney thought some of my views are ‘out there’ – but he always treated me, and my ideas, with respect, and constructive interest in figuring things out.
    I am glad that Dick stayed in touch with him; I fell out of touch (as I do in general), and am sure I am worse for it both personally and certainly philosophically. Sydney was a wonderful and important philosophical influence, as well as brilliant, if quiet, philosopher. Thank you , Sydney.

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  8. Becko Copenhaver

    Reading these memories makes me feel connected through Sydney to all the other people he influenced and supported. He was all the things people have said. He was on my committee because he was one of the few people who had heard of Reid and had actually read him — part of his dissertation was on Reid. Having him on my committee with two other incredibly supportive people — Allen Wood and Zoltan Szabo — got me through grad school. I never would have made it without them. Sydney was solidly in my corner at a very difficult, hazardous time.

    He was also warm and now-and-then playful: he always had a giant standard poodle — one after another — and I loved catching a glimpse of him riding his scooter to work. My funniest memory of Sydney is going into his office to discuss something. He was so quiet and slow. Quiet people make me nervous, and when I get nervous I talk louder and faster than I already do. I worked myself up into quite a tizzy and Sydney just looked at me, cocked his head sideways, and shook his head "no". Anyone else and it would have devastated me. But he was always gentle with me.

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  9. Tim O'Connor

    Sydney was one of my graduate school teachers and a member of my dissertation committee. What stands out to me is the simple love he had for interesting philosophical ideas and careful philosophical arguments built on them — a love that persisted through the years of his long career. And his tenacity — he would doggedly pursue points of disagreement through multiple drafts of thesis chapters. As has been remarked, he was often slow on his feet. But if he hadn’t fully developed a point in conversation, you could expect a typed-out, multi-paged response in your mailbox the next morning.
    Like my father (born in the same year), Sydney was not given to effusive praise. Applying lessons from my childhood experience, I eventually figured out that when I received back a paper or chapter draft from him with few comments, that meant Sydney thought it well done, and it made my day. (One day back then, my then-and-still wife remarked to me, ‘you seem rather chipper today.’ / ‘Yeah, Sydney Shoemaker finally complimented me on a chapter draft.’ / ‘What did he say?’ / ‘Nothing – the guy didn’t manage to lay a glove on me!’)

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  10. Tim O'Connor

    Sydney was one of my graduate school teachers and a member of my dissertation committee. What stands out to me is the simple love he had for interesting philosophical ideas and careful philosophical arguments built on them — a love that persisted through the years of his long career. And his tenacity — he would doggedly pursue points of disagreement through multiple drafts of thesis chapters. As has been remarked, he was often slow on his feet. But if he hadn’t fully developed a point in conversation, you could expect a typed-out, multi-paged response in your mailbox the next morning.
    Like my father (born in the same year), Sydney was not given to effusive praise. Applying lessons from my childhood experience, I eventually figured out that when I received back a paper or chapter draft from him with few comments, that meant Sydney thought it well done, and it made my day. (One day back then, my then-and-still wife remarked to me, ‘you seem rather chipper today.’ / ‘Yeah, Sydney Shoemaker finally complimented me on a chapter draft.’ / ‘What did he say?’ / ‘Nothing – the guy didn’t manage to lay a glove on me!’)

    Reply
  11. Hilary Kornblith

    These comments so nicely capture what it was like to work with Sydney. Sydney was my dissertation advisor as well, and I served as his TA one term. I vividly remember one session of a graduate seminar he taught my first term at Cornell. As others have mentioned, Sydney would simply read the very extensive material he had typed out for each seminar meeting. He'd read a chunk of it, and then pause for questions. On the occasion I have in mind, there was a question right near the end of the class which he really didn't adequately answer. None of us thought much of it; this sort of thing happens. The next week, he began by saying that he hadn't adequately answered a question that came up the time before, but he'd now had a chance to think about it and he had a bit more to say. And he then pulled out about a dozen or so type-written pages, and he read out his answer. It's not just that it was a masterful response to an interesting question. We all realized that this was what it was like to be taken seriously, and that quick off the cuff responses, however impressive at the time, were nothing compared to this. It provided a model for us all of what philosophy could be.

    It's nice too, in reading these remarks from others, to see Sydney's character so well captured. He was a warm, generous, self-effacing person. He could be quite funny too, and it was always such a pleasure just to do philosophy with him. My own ways of thinking about philosophical issues are, in many ways, quite different from Sydney's, but he was just so damned good at seeing things from someone else's perspective and being able to suggest ways to develop one's ideas.

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  12. Robert C Hockett

    Before financial-crisis-related work for the New York Fed led me to spend most of my non-teaching days away from Ithaca beginning in 2010, I spent nearly all of my time in this wonderful place. And this allowed me to see Sydney near every day in any number of three contexts.

    First, I used to ride a silly red bicycle, wearing a sillier red helmet, each day as my sole means of transport – the same I'd been using since grad school. (Tamar and Zoltan, whose house I passed every morning until they moved to New Haven, will likely remember this.) In my travels I'd sometimes spot someone whose adorably silly look possibly out-did my own: it was Sydney, on his little red scooter. He'd always smile as if in subtle acknowledgment of our shared silliness, and gently wave or nod in the most courtly of manners. This was the best possible inoculation, against self-doubt in respect of my travel-mode, that I could have imagined.

    Second, I used regularly to take my canine housemate on long walks among the densely tree-lined pathways and roadways of the neighborhood we shared with Sydney and *his* line of canine housemates – always tall standard poodles who not only shared Sydney's stature, but also appeared to be patterning their dignified demeanors after Sydney's. There was, notwithstanding Sydney's and dawg's similar stateliness, always one chink in the dignity-armor: my canine pal was always rambunctious, and every time worked to recruit Sydney's pal into a bit of roughhousing. Sydney and I would smile and lock eyes as if to say 'what're ya gonna do?,' then indulge the two critters for a minute or two. Then we'd part ways with a shared chuckle and shake of the head.

    Third, having done my Oxford grad work in Philosophy before becoming a lawyer, I used to attend as many public philosophy talks here on the Cornell campus as I could. Present at seemingly all or near all of them would be Sydney. I of course knew who he was, and even had guessed how he must look, long before coming to Cornell. I would accordingly have recognized him in any case. But how lovely it was to be as it were 'officially' recognized and smiled at by Sydney as well at these gatherings, all thanks to our shared cycling and dog-walking lives.

    Drawing this all together, I'd say there was probably one quality above all others that Sydney just naturally exuded around someone like me who was remotely a colleague of sorts but much more a neighbor than colleague: he was somehow regal and courtly yet all the while humble and self-effacing as well. A bit like biographers always describe George Washington. His distinction spoke entirely for itself – 'res ipsa loquitur,' as the lawyers say. And thanks to this, simply seeing him each day made you feel you lived in a remarkably decent and civilized place, where continual conversation, lifelong learning, and healthy relations to others, to nature, and through them to the world at large could be 'taken for,' because they *were*, indeed 'granted.

    All of which I suppose is to say that all of us in Ithaca, even we merely *former* philosophers, already feel his absence acutely.

    Reply
  13. John Fischer

    Hilary: I love the anecdote about the question at the end of the seminar. Perfect! That captures Sydney's dedication to getting it right. This was something he shared with many of the other faculty members at Cornell, including his life-long friend and partner-in-philosophical crime, Carl Ginet. I believe they had lunch regularly for years at The Glenwood Pines, a great place for burgers and bloody Marys that looked out over Cayuga Lake. Their friendship was, in Dick Moran's word, 'beautiful,' and a model of how philosophy and friendship can blend and sustain both a seriousness and playfulness.

    Ithaca had many virtues. I also note that the older I get, the better it was!!

    Reply
  14. Ken Winkler

    I hope it's all right if someone who didn't know Sydney Shoemaker shares a brief story of very remote contact with him. Back in the late 1970's or very early 1980's, I was waiting to hear about a paper I'd submitted — by post — to the Philosophical Review. My paper had been at the journal for five or six months. I hadn't heard a thing, so I sent a letter to the editors, asking whether they had come to a decision. I explained that since the paper had been with them for so long, I assumed they had sent it to a referee. I would, I said, be eager to hear what the referee had to say. Sydney Shoemaker sent me a kind (and carefully typewritten) letter back, explaining that the paper had not been sent to a referee. It had instead been lost in what was thought to be an empty file cabinet. I've never forgotten the opening words of his letter, which cause me to smile whenever I bring them to mind: "Contrary to what you reasonably inferred, . . . . "

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  15. John Perry

    These comments brought back a lot of memories of Sydney. Frenchie and I arrived in Ithaca in Fall 1964 with our son Jim, moving into Hasbrouck Apartments a bit before he quarter got started to give us time to get adjusted. Sydney was the first person from the department that I met. I went into a bookstore and saw a young person, my age or younger I would have thought, looking at the philosophy books. I thought he must be a graduate student, but it was Sydney. He was looking at his own book with hadn't been out very long. Great guy, great teacher, gave great seminars well described in some of the comments. He left for Rockefeller before I finished my dissertation on Identity, but nicely returned to Cornell for the orals and was a great help and inspiration. And then, before long, he realized he belonged at Cornell.

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  16. James C. Klagge

    Shoemaker was Visiting Associate Professor (1967-1968) and Associate Professor (1968–1969) at Rockefeller University.

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  17. Jeffrey Roland

    So sorry to hear of Sydney's passing. Many of these reminiscences resonate with me and bring fond memories of my time as a grad student at Cornell to mind. That red scooter! It looked so small with Sydney perched on it!

    My first grad seminar at Cornell in 1996 was Sydney's on mental causation. Coming from a math/logic background in undergrad, I was unfamiliar with much of the background material for this course. Needless to say, I learned a lot. But what really struck me then and has stuck with me since was the atmosphere in the room, the people there and the way business was conducted. The seminar was held in one of those rooms in Goldwin-Smith with an enormous square table (or maybe it was two large tables pushed together), and every week around that table would be not only first and second year grad students still doing coursework but a number of advanced grad students (among them Susanna Siegel, Jessica Wilson, and Becko Copenhaver) and faculty, both from Cornell and elsewhere in the area. I remember Dick Boyd, Zoltan Szabo, and Jason Stanley as regular participants; Ted Sider and a colleague of his at Rochester would also drive down to attend. The overriding feeling in the room was that we were collectively engaged in a project. We might disagree and probe as philosophers do, but it was never about getting over or up on someone. It was about working the problem at hand cooperatively. That was a mark of the Cornell approach, due in no small part to Sydney and others like Carl Ginet and Norman Kretzmann who had shaped the department for decades. I've yet to see so congenial an environment for doing philosophy since graduating from Cornell.

    Several people have mentioned Sydney's lecture style, reading from copious typed notes. What many of the grad students in my time marveled at was how Sydney seemed *not* to be reading those notes. He would stand with the notes and, so it seemed, recite them–only glancing down occasionally. It was amazing. (One also shouldn't forget the crude yet effective board drawings, some of which I myself have used in teaching over the years.)

    One other thing, brought to mind by something Becko said about the gentle way in which Sydney would interact: Sometimes if you said something he found really implausible, he would tilt his head a bit, smile, and then shake his head. It was a rebuff, but it was so good humored that it wasn't off putting. It was as if he was saying, "That's nice. Let's see if we can't find something better." And then, of course, he'd proceed to help do just that.

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  18. Carl Ginet

    Here is a notice posted on the Sage School's web page:
    https://philosophy.cornell.edu/news/brilliant-and-beloved-philosopher-sydney-shoemaker-dies-90

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  19. Brian Ogilvie

    Robert Hockett mentioned dog walking. Sydney's son Peter once told me this story: In the days when Sydney had a letter-quality printer, which took quite some time to print out a paper draft, he would start printing, then take his dog for a walk while the printer was at work. Their Old English Sheepdog, Maggie, was soon conditioned to head for the door whenever she heard the printer start up.

    The historian in me feels obliged to mention for posterity that the two Cornell notices omit Sydney's daughter-in-law Jill Lagerstrom from the list of survivors and misspell his grandson Erik's name.

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