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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: Mark Sagoff (1941-2023)

Brian Leiter

A leading contributor to environmental philosophy and ethics, Professor Sagoff spent several decades with the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, first at the University of Maryland, College Park and then at George Mason University.  The Institute's memorial notice is here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Sagoff or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.

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3 responses to “In Memoriam: Mark Sagoff (1941-2023)”

  1. William J Rapaport

    I was an undergrad at the University of Rochester when Mark was a grad student. I didn't know him well, but I do remember him having a fine sense of humor.

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  2. Edwin McCann

    I was very much saddened to hear of Mark’s death. When I was a first-year grad student at Penn I took Mark’s seminar in Kant’s’Critique of Pure Reason, and it came as a revelation to me that careful study of the history of philosophy could itself be a way of doing philosophy, and that set me on the path I’ve been on ever since. In that course we focused as much on philosophically rich commentary on Kant (Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense, Bennett’s Kant’s Analytic, Sellars’s Science and Metaphysics, Margaret Wilson’s criticism of Turbayne on Kant’s phenomenalism, Rorty’s critical analysis of Strawson’s book). Working with Mark later on other things—an independent study on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (as it was then known in English translation) focusing on the Introductions and the Judgment of Taste, which was Mark’s main interest in Kant, and serving as a TA in his introductory level course on Aesthetics, in which the main text was Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art gave me a background in philosophical aesthetics which I’ve drawn on in several courses I’ve taught. So I owe a lot to Mark.
    Along with this, I got to become a friend of one of the most warm, open, generous, and genuinely witty—Oscar Wilde or James Whistler class witty—people I’ve ever come to know. He had a deep allergy to pomposity in others or in himself, and he deployed a sublimely self-deprecating humor to stifle any wayward impulses and used his wit to call out the pomposity on offer in the passing show in academia. I enjoyed every moment I got to spend with him.
    One last thing—I was present at the creation, so to speak, when Mark wrote the article ‘On Preserving the Natural Environment’, which was the launching pad for his later career as an environmental ethicist. It had a fortuitous origin—a former undergraduate student of Mark’s who had gone on to serve as one of the student editors of the Yale Law Journal commissioned the article as a response to a Yale Law Journal article by Laurence Tribe. It proved to be the perfect occasion for Mark to bring to bear his deep learning in American studies (especially due to Perry Miller) and in aesthetics and ethics to the problem of providing a non-utilitarian rationale for preservation of the environment, and it was the first entry in a large and important body of work in the decades since.

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  3. Peter van Inwagen

    Mark and I were fellow graduate students at the University of Rochester in the late sixties. I remember him very vividly and am sad to hear of his death. He was an excellent philosopher and a master of irony–and extraordinarily well read.

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