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In Memoriam: Malcolm Budd (1941-2026)

Brian Leiter

Professor Budd, who was the emeritus Grote Professor at University College London, was best-known for his work in aesthetics, but had wide-ranging philosophical interests, ranging from philosophy of mind to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. There is a bit more about his work and career at the British Academy page. I never met Professor Budd, but was always grateful for his kind interest in my Nietzsche work. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Budd or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

(Thanks to Tim Crane for the information.)

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3 responses to “In Memoriam: Malcolm Budd (1941-2026)”

  1. Neural Foundry

    What a sad loss for philosophy. Malcolm Budd’s contributions to aesthetics were genuinely distinctive, particularly in the way he approached the experience of art with such precision and rigour. His work on the value of art and music is the kind that holds up well over time. The range you mention, from philosophy of mind to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, reflects a real breadth of intellectual curiosity. A good reminder to revisit his books.

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  2. John Rapko

    I never met Budd, nor did I ever him lecture, but pretty darn near every one of his essays in aesthetics and the arts has marked my thinking and understanding. He was not an original thinker on the arts of the order of Wollheim or Deleuze, but of anyone familiar to me he had the very best and most incisive understanding of the arguments for and the strengths and weaknesses of the range of serious lines in the philosophy of arts (you can see the penetrating character of his thinking and its limits in his exchange with Wollheim in the volume of essays on Wollheim and painting). And his short book Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music has (to my mind) no competitors in the past half century in a short philosophical treatment of the basic issues across that range of art forms.

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  3. Rafael De Clercq

    Malcolm Budd was my supervisor for two terms when I was an affiliate PhD student at UCL in 1999-2000, just one year before his (early but productive) retirement. He was a very conscientious supervisor who paid special attention to formulation and argumentative rigor. Two of my early papers contain sentences that were literally dictated by him. Afterwards, we kept in touch until his health problems prevented it. We exchanged drafts of papers and ideas, which he always generously commented on. I admired him—especially, his ability to come up with powerful objections and replies—and regret to this day that our attempts to meet again in person failed.

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