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Georgy Maksimovich pointed me to this article in Russian: https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/05/25/antisovetskie-filosofskie-kontratseptsii
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Professor Malcolm, a longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California at Davis, where he was emeritus, died in September 2023. A scholar of ancient philosophy, he was best-known for his work on Plato. The UC Davis memorial notice is here. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Malcolm or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.
(Thanks to David Copp for the pointer.)
Professor Malcolm was a member of my dissertation committee. I have fond memories of him as one of the kindest people I knew at UC Davis when I was a grad student there (2006-12). He was a professor emeritus then. We bonded over our shared interest in ancient Greek philosophy. He volunteered to teach me Latin. We poured over a lot of obscure texts together and debated about how best to interpret them. He always respected my takes and took me seriously as a budding philosopher. He had a quirky sense of humor that occasionally made me cringe, and yet I liked him exactly as who he was. He'll be missed.
John Malcolm was a great inspiration, undoubtedly my favorite professor as an undergraduate. I took four classes with him in the early 1990s: Intro to Ancient, the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle. He seemed to have a deep sense of the strangeness of ancient philosophy, and knew how to draw that out, you could almost say to bring it back alive. That got me hooked. This sense was evident in his published work on the Third Man argument, and even more evident in his lectures on the same topic, which I still remember, as on other problems and paradoxes in ancient philosophy that seem to show, in various ways, that the world just can't be as it appears. He also called me at home to tell me how much he appreciated my essay for the Plato final exam, which had never happened before (and has never happened since, now that I think about it). That was a huge and probably life-changing event for me.
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