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In Memoriam: Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026)

Brian Leiter

Professor Hill was a leading moral philosopher, known especially for his work on Kantian ethics. He was emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he taught from 1984 until his retirement in 2017 (he taught at UCLA from 1968 until his move to Chapel Hill). Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Hill or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

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8 responses to “In Memoriam: Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026)”

  1. James C. Klagge

    I mainly knew Tom during his last several years at UCLA, but in addition to his many intellectual virtues, he was perhaps the kindest, gentlest philosopher I’ve known.

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  2. Ian Cruise

    As a person, Tom beautifully exemplified the Kantian precept to value humanity. Many in the philosophical community will know about his work and its significance. Perhaps fewer will know about the pivotal role he had in shaping UNC Philosophy’s culture, which has, for many years, had a reputation for being a congenial place to do philosophy. I’m sure many of his former students will attest that he was extremely supportive. His encouragement about a paper I wrote for one of his classes led me to start submitting my work to conferences and the like, and at a time when I felt a bit philosophically aimless. He helped get me back on track. I’m very glad to have known him.

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  3. Matt Lister

    I’d only met Hill a couple of times, and in group settings, so while I liked him a lot and thought he was very nice, I can’t say I knew him well. But, I was, and am, a very big fan of his work. Pretty much everything I’ve read by him I’ve found useful, careful, and intersting, but I’ll note in particular that he did a great job of showing how Kant’s thought, and Kantian approaches more generally, can be useful and important for thinking about things like disability and race, topics where it was often claimed to be of no or negative use. I think his work on these topics, and others, will be worth going back to for a long time.

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  4. Richard Galvin

    Today we lost one of the finest persons in our profession. He was a truly warm human being, kind, generous and welcoming. I was never Tom’s “student” ( didn’t go to UCLA or UNC) but I did get to spend the summer of ’93 at NC with 11 other people, who had some claim to being engaged in Kant scholarship, at a NEH summer seminar. It was 8 weeks, 4 days a week, three hours in the seminar meeting, and then virtually every day many of us would head to the Lenoir cafeteria for lunch. That often lasted more than three hours as well. It was, to be sure, the graduate seminar I never had the opportunity to participate in when I was a graduate student. Tom chose great people–there were no greenhorns, and we all brought something to the table. And he wasn’t there to shove his views down our throats–he was there as a teacher and (just as important) as a learner. One of the remarkable things about Tom was his ability to try to push us even further than we might be comfortable going without being threatening or domineering. His influence on me as both a teacher and as scholar was immeasurable. We also developed what amounted to a more than thirty year friendship. I will also say that having come to know a number of his former students over the years, that he left his mark on them as well. He was (of course) a top tier Kant scholar, but he was much more than that. And I am grateful for having been his friend and student. I will miss him dearly as, I’m sure, will countless others.

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  5. Samuel Reis-Dennis

    I was Tom Hill’s student at UNC from 2011-2017. He supervised my master’s thesis and was the second reader on my dissertation committee. As a mentor, Tom gently offered a wealth of quiet suggestions and deep insights while helping me to find my own style. He was deliberate, sensitive, and understated; he did not take short-cuts; he did not make a big show of reaching a Big Conclusion. Learning from him required patience, open-mindedness, and humility. He was a life-changing teacher.

    When I entered the PhD program, just out of college at age 22, I think I mostly saw philosophy as a negative undertaking: one lies in wait for others to futilely build theories and then bombards them with an onslaught of devastating counterexamples. Tom’s vision of philosophy was so much brighter and more expansive. Although he appreciated and affirmed the value of fair competition (he was a successful wrestler and played offensive line for Harvard), he warned me of the pitfalls of conceiving of philosophy in metaphors of war. Indeed, he reminded his seminar students at the beginning of every semester that philosophy was not easy, and he invited us to see what kind of progress we could make if we pursued its great questions collaboratively and as equals.

    Developing the courage and ability to articulate my own ethical outlook took time. One day, feeling frustrated, I showed up at Tom’s office hours to ask why he, someone who respected and had once been gripped by ordinary language philosophy, was so invested in positive, theoretical work. What good could it possibly do? Tom did not belittle my question, nor did he betray any disappointment or frustration. Instead, he tenderly and hopefully explained how good philosophy might retain its theoretical aspirations while being honest about its limits. “People take theories and use them to change the world,” he said.

    Tom’s prose models the qualities he encouraged in his students. His writing is clear, charitable, and expressive of an exceptional sense of what matters. While his philosophy begins, as he wrote in the introduction to Autonomy and Self-Respect, “with genuine puzzlement,” it never reduces the philosopher to a cheap puzzle-solver. His work makes his grand themes—respect, equality, human dignity—urgent and accessible without draining them of their power to inspire. It reflects a Kantian vision, of course, but, like Tom, it is also distinctively American, even (and especially) in its criticism of American bigotry and war. Reading Tom’s writing made me a less cynical person, deepening my understanding of our highest values and renewing my commitment to them.

    I was lucky not only to learn from Tom, but also to become his friend. During my first week in Chapel Hill, Tom and his wife, Robin, welcomed me by inviting me to join a group of his students that met regularly for dim sum. Through those meals, as well as trips to the symphony, discussions of his football days, and hours in his classes, I came to delight in Tom’s subtle and warm sense of humor in addition to his famous bigheartedness.

    When Tom retired, he generously agreed to participate in a reading group with Vida Yao (another former UNC student) and me that we convened over Zoom for years until his recent health issues and our busy schedules made it impossible. In these meetings, we tried to draw out Tom-the-teacher but he insisted, predicably, on a more egalitarian arrangement. He almost always refused to select texts for us but gamely read everything we assigned—often the work of some of Kant’s fiercest critics. Rather than defensively attempting to undermine these detractors, Tom approached every session with an open mind. Mostly, he wanted us to do the talking, interjecting from time to time to lightly steer us in more fruitful directions or to share amusing anecdotes of the characters he encountered as a younger philosopher at Oxford, Harvard, and UCLA.

    I relished those sessions and I will cherish my memories of them along with my memories of working with Tom as a student. He was a wonderful philosopher and friend who enriched my life immeasurably. I will miss him.

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  6. Stephen Darwall

    Tom was both a wonderful philosopher and human being. I remember first getting to know him when he spent a year at the National Humanities Center during my last year at Chapel Hill. We had numerous conversations, and he was unfailingly kind, but tenacious. I’ll never forget when I saw Tom along with David Falk and a couple of other UNC faculty members heading to lunch the day after I told David that I was going to Michigan. The wheels were turning that day.

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  7. Daniel Layman

    Tom was a member of my dissertation committee at UNC, where I received my PhD in 2014. Even though I was working on Locke rather than on Kant or anything else directly in his wheelhouse, Tom never tired of reading my work and providing feedback that was at once supportive and rigorous. He was also a wonderful mentor beyond the office and the seminar room. Once, early in my time in Chapel Hill, Tom overheard me talking about music and invited me to attend a symphony performance in Durham, just down the road. I don’t remember much about the performance, but I do remember how it felt to be treated as a friend and equal by a giant in my field when I was still very green. For these reasons and many more, I’m grateful to have known Tom. He will be missed.

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  8. Andrew Courtwright

    In one of my UNC graduate seminars with Tom, a classmate remarked that cotemporary Kantians seemed interested in Kant only insofar as it allowed them to attack neo-Humeans. Tom replied with an analogy he ascribed to Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, said Tom, thought of intellectual positions—rationalism, non-cognitivism, realism—as citadels. Some philosophers occupy the fortress and expend their cognitive power lobbing arguments against other citadels, trying to pound them into intellectual dust. Others develop formidable defensive weapons with complex and ingenious responses to actual and possible objections to their doctrines, thereby deflecting attack. But, Berlin said, the inner fortress—the vision of life for the sake of which battles are waged—usually turns out to be relatively simple and unsophisticated.

    For me, Tom’s “Autonomy and Self-Respect” and each subsequent collection of essays and lectures was work that makes Kant’s inner fortress not just complex and sophisticated but fundamentally livable. Or, I should say—to borrow one of Tom’s favorite disclaimers—maybe not Kant’s own inner fortress but a Kantian one.

    Tom managed to make what is usually thought of as cold and distant philosophical territory into a place to reside. Although I am a physician now and rarely lean on my doctoral work with Tom, it is a testament to him that, when I am considering ethical concerns in the hospital, I am rarely launching a catapult at a far-off enemy. Rather, I’m trying to do the normative work needed to keep up the place.

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