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A longtime member of the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he was emeritus, Professor Bolton was a specialist in ancient philosophy, particularly known for his writings on issues about metaphysics and science. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Bolton or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.
In 2006 there was going to be a get-together of people working on the commentaries of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics — in addition to me, there was James South and John Longeway working on Latin texts — so we planned a get together here at Marquette, in Milwaukee. Rob Bolton learned of it, and came. That started a yearly tradition of a conference on those working on Aristotle and Aristotelianisms, still going. Rob came loyally, up to 2019, after which we had the pandemic, and back issues made it too hard for him to travel.
People came because they knew Rob would be there. Our ample time for discussion was perfect for him. Even if the paper given wasn't so good, his extended questions and analyses in response were worth close listening. And his own papers of course were first rate.
I enjoyed chatting with him, about Aristotle, the politics of our profession, and life in general.
He made a definite decision to write articles, not a book. But he kept coming back to some of the same issues concerning Aristotle's method and the epistemology that undergirds his use of dialectic — there really is a coherent book there, among the scattered articles. Someone should collect them and edit a book. It would be a key text.
It was good to see him in zoom papers until very recently. He'll be missed.
I met Rob around 2013 while I was a graduate student at Princeton. I took the train up to New Brunswick once per week for a seminar he was teaching on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. He was just obsessed, in a contagious way, with the puzzles about episteme and nous that emerge from various passages in that text. He had a wonderful way of inviting students into the puzzles without solving the problems for us. Every time I've encountered Rob since then has been in some context to do with the problems of episteme in Aristotle. I've come to associate the two so closely that I can scarcely put my mind to the Posterior Analytics without the image of Rob arising as well, and all to my delight! He will be missed at every future conference and workshop on the APo.
I was a visiting undergraduate student at Rutgers in 1998/99 and got encouraged by Pierre Pellegrin to take Rob's graduate seminar on Aristotle's metaphysics, which he kindly let me do. As a prerequisite, I was asked to read Mary Louise Gill's Aristotle on Substance (which me and a friend of mine then read on our Christmas journey from New Jersey to Grand Canyon and back). I made very dense notes in that seminar (that I still have somewhere) and got the idea that I'd like to do the kind of stuff Rob was doing as a career. In the end, I didn't end up working on metaphysics and science as I thought I would. But Rob's seminar was a big part of my motivation to try to make Ancient philosophy my career. Rob was very kind to and supportive of me in the seminar, and also many times that we met afterwards while I was in Princeton and later at various conferences. Btw, Rob's collected articles are available:
https://philpapers.org/rec/BOLSDE
At Rutgers, Professor Bolton was my favorite professor as a undergraduate philosophy major. It is with deep sadness to learn that he has passed. His classes in Ancient Philosophy were, without question, the finest offered by the department, while I was a student. He taught Socrates and Plato with a passion encouraging his students with a interest in ancient philosophy with helpful readings to coincide with his lectures. He clearly loved the subject. He seemed inspired by those in this area of philosophy such as Gregory Vlastos from Princeton. My sincere condolences to his colleagues over the years and, of course, his family.
Here is a memorial notice for Rob:
Robert Bolton 1940-2024
Professor Bolton was a renowned expert on Aristotle who taught at Rutgers for 52 years. After earning his B.A. at Princeton (including a senior thesis on Plato’s Theory of Forms, directed by Gregory Vlastos), he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he worked with G.E.L. Owen, writing on Plato’s Cratylus. Rob earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on the Cratylus under the direction of Julius Moravscik and Nicholas White. He came to Rutgers in 1971, where he eventually helped philosophy to become a research focused department with a strong graduate program; he served as Vice-Chair for Faculty Recruitment during crucial years of rapid growth. Rob was also chair of the committee that inaugurated a linguistics program at Rutgers, which then became an important department with close ties to philosophy.
Rob published over 30 articles and edited several volumes during a scholarly career of 50 years. Much of Rob’s work centered on Aristotle, specifically Aristotle’s philosophy of science, philosophical methodology, epistemology, and metaphysics. He was especially known for his work on Aristotle’s ideas about the nature of science and scientific inquiry, the nature of dialectic and its relationship to science, and the application of these methodological and epistemological ideas in Aristotle’s works. Rob challenged the once dominant view that Aristotle’s procedures of inquiry in his major works — e.g. Physics, De Anima, and Metaphysics — are philosophical and not scientific. Rob’s response to this approach to Aristotle included a substantial, new interpretation of the Posterior Analytics, and a demonstration of how the guide to genuine scientific inquiry in that work is manifested in Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and other works. He also mounted a defense of the thesis that, in his Ethics, Aristotle’s mode of inquiry is truly philosophical, and not scientific. In recent years, Rob continued to explore the interplay of philosophical and scientific inquiry in Aristotle, and the special mode of human understanding that Aristotle calls moral wisdom. He argued that moral wisdom differs both from scientific knowledge and from the philosophical mode of human understanding that Aristotle reaches in his Ethics.
His pioneering and influential approach to Aristotle’s philosophy of science and philosophical methodology can be found in such papers as: “Essentialism and Semantic Theory in Aristotle: Posterior Analytics, II, 7-10”, The Philosophical Review (1976); “Aristotle's Definitions of the Soul: De Anima II, 1-3”, Phronesis (1978); “Definition and scientific method in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and Generation of Animals”, in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology (1987); “The Epistemological Basis of Aristotelian Dialectic”, in Biologie, Logique, et Metaphysique chez Aristote (1990); “Aristotle’s Method in Natural Science”, in Aristotle’s Physics (1991); “The Problem of Dialectical Reasoning (Συλλογισμόϛ) in Aristotle”, Ancient Philosophy (1994); “Aristotle's Conception of Metaphysics as a Science”, in Unity, Identity, and Explanation in Aristotle's Metaphysics (1994); “Science and the Science of Substance in Metaphysics Z”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1995); “Aristotle on Essence and Necessity in Science”, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy (1997); “Aristotle: Epistemology and Methodology”, in The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (2003); “Dialectic, Peirastic and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations”, History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis (2012); “The Search for Principles in Aristotle: Posterior Analytics 2 and Generation of Animals 1”, in Aristotle's Generation of Animals: A Critical Guide (2017); and many more.
(Dean Zimmerman, Chris Hauser)
I first met Rob at a conference in Stockholm in 2014 and was rather in awe of him. Since then, he has been a warm and indeed tireless stimulus and encouragement to me in my research, constantly eager to read and comment on whatever I might produce, and sharing his own recent outputs in return. We were working together on a project on Aristotle on testimony and credibility, from which the absence now of his involvement will be a serious loss. I had been hoping to see him again in person about this later this year. I fully concur with the others who report how valuable his generous warmth about others' work was. There are those for whom self-confidence about their work is never in short supply. For the rest of us, the presence of the Rob Boltons in our lives is invaluable.
Really nice memorial
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