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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: David Gauthier (1932-2023)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 12–UPDATED

Via his former student Claire Finkelstein on Twitter, I learned that Professor Gauthier died on November 9.   He was emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, whose department he joined in 1980 after more than twenty years at the University of Toronto.  He was well-known for his contributions to political and moral philosophy, and its history (especially Hobbes and Rousseau).   You can learn a bit more about his work here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Gauthier, or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.  Please feel free to submit links in the comments to obituaries and memorial notices as well.

UPDATE:   A memorial notice from the University of Toronto, and another from the University of Pittsburgh.

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7 responses to “In Memoriam: David Gauthier (1932-2023)”

  1. Matt Lister

    I met David Gauthier only a couple of times, after he was already retired, when he took part in events at Penn. He was always charming and very sharp in discussion. But more than that I really enjoyed learning from his writings. When I first read _Morals by Agreement_ I found it very frustrating, but it was one of those books that I went back to many times and learned more and more from each time, even if I still disagreed with much of it. I also thought his work on Hobbes was teriffic, even if it's done in a style that's not in fashion as much these days. When I read his book on Rousseau a few years ago I was surprised to see how different in style it was from his book on Hobbes – he clearly was interested in different things in the two authors and so wrote two very different, but both very interesting books. I hope people will keep engaging with his work, as there is a lot to learn there, both in substance and style.

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  2. V. Alan White

    Matt–if I may–were I Prof. Gauthier I would not want a better tribute. Thank you.

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  3. Chrisoula Andreou

    I was one of David’s last students at the University of Pittsburgh. Working with him was a great experience for me and an amazing privilege. He was extremely generous with his time and provided me with a steady stream of insightful and constructive feedback. When I temporarily had to move back to Canada while working on my PhD, David would graciously cut into his travel time to meet with me about my dissertation during his fairly regular visits to Toronto. When I finished my PhD, I was a bit hesitant to ask him if he would be going to the graduation ceremony. It was normally a huge, impersonal event and my sense was that PhD students rarely attended. But my parents were so dead set on driving the ten+ hours from Montreal to Pittsburgh for the event, I felt like I might as well ask. David not only attended, but had my family over to his place for a small reception after the graduation. It was a perfect celebration and, knowing about his upcoming retirement made it all the more special. At the University of Utah, where I am now, I routinely teach his work in my classes on practical reason and doing so has helped me gain a deeper understanding of some of the motivations for the most revisionary aspects of his work. I am so grateful for the time I got to spend with this amazing philosopher and mentor.

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  4. Christopher Morris

    David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement has to be his best known work, and certainly an important and impressive work. When it was published it was widely discussed and reviewed. The argument has many parts, and he came to think some were wanting or needed development (see his “Twenty-Five On”, reprinted in one of his two 2022 collections).

    Instead of the book I would often recommend his essays to students or colleagues seeking an introduction to his work — for instance, the magnificent “Hume, Contractarian” or “Three Against Justice: The Foole, the Sensible Knave, and the Lydian Sheperd”. Also, an early expression of self-criticism which he later retracted, the splendid “The Social Contract as Ideology”.

    Much of his later work concerned his changing view of rationality and constraint. The famous ch. VI of MA, which defends “constrained maximization”, did not engage with certain important questions about his revisionist conception of rationality. He wrote many essays refining his view and trying to meet challenges. His “Assure and Threaten” (1994) is well-known, but his many other post-MA essays, now collected in Rational Deliberation (2022), are not widely known. Many readers picking up this volume might start with “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Prisoner’s Dilemma” (2015): “Far from fitting the label ‘dilemma’,” he concludes, “the Prisoner’s Dilemma exhibits the clash between two rival accounts of practical rationality.” Over the years he turned against central features of the orthodox maximizing conception.

    David was a thinker from an earlier age — a pre-computer age. He would think and think and when the thoughts were right, he’d sit down and type. The thoughts were not always right, and sometimes nothing would happen seated in front of the typewriter. But other times they just poured onto the page. I believe he told me Logic of Leviathan was written start-to-finish in three months, and I think the Hume essay was written in a weekend. After the two recent volumes of essays were completed (OUP 2022), he worked on another paper, a last. Unable to type, he was thinking about it right up the end, dictating bits as they came to him.

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  5. Ben Laurence

    I did not share any of David Gauthier's views. But as a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1990's, he was a wonderful teacher of my first year moral philosophy seminar. I still remember vividly how he would begin every class, constructing, with a twinkle in his eye, in his high-pitched voice, a devilish thought experiment to interrogate the texts we were reading. These thought experiments invariably, and often absurdly, cast him in the role of some villain. So he might begin, "Suppose I was a poisoner mixing my lethal concoction…" or "Suppose I were Cleopatra and I decided to order my slaves to…". There was a sense of fun and adventure, and he really relished the arguments. He had no need for us to agree with him about anything. He was also one of the only professors who took our instruction as teachers seriously, insisting on sitting in on each section that his TAs were teaching of his courses to provide us with real feedback.

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  6. Ram Neta

    I took Gauthier's graduate seminar on justice my first semester at Pitt, and loved it. He was a great teacher, and made the material more fun than I could have imagined. A few years later I TA'd for his undergraduate ethics course, and he made all the TA's dress up like historically important philosophers and debate each other. I had to dress up like Aristotle (I.e., toga). I still haven't forgiven him for that.

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  7. Jon J. Kanitz

    When professor Gauthier was chairman of the University of Toronto philosophy department I took his graduate seminar on Theory of Justice. I still remember him speaking to his class with his forehead in his hands and
    speaking without notes into a book on the table. In my paper on Rawls and Nozick, I can see how David's lucid and compelling writing style influenced my own and made it better. Before I signed up for this course I was
    already intimidated into thinking that he would be the toughest marker I would ever face in my doctoral courses. I will never forget the day I picked up that paper after he marked it with an A+, the highest single mark
    that I ever received in graduate school, but I couldn't have done it without him.

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