I returned from holiday to learn that two old teachers, Hugo Bedau, and Leonard Linsky had died. I'll write about Leonard soon; I heartily recommend a look at Stephen Menn's remniscences here.
I was never close to Hugo. As an undergraduate, I found his standards and integrity very intimidating, and was too scared to write papers for him. But his second wife, Constance (herself a very accomplished historian), turned out to be a classmate (if I recall correctly) in Norman Daniels' bioethics course. And we became study-friends. Somehow my mom ended up on Constance's annual update. So, even after I had moved on, I would hear about Hugo on a regular basis, including his ongoing work on Bentham (sadly unmentioned in the NYT and Tufts obituaries). It is no understatement that Hugo built Tufts into the philosophy powerhouse it became. Tufts was not a very serious academic place when he arrived in the mid-60s (as old-timers on The Hill would admit). Hugo recruited all the future stars; he had a very discerning eye for philosophical promise! After retirement it became evident that he was also the social/political glue that held a lot of strong personalities together.
His brilliant Romanell lectures were, in part, a defense of casuistry; they made a lasting impression on me (if only to leave a lingering suspicion of the art he defended with such skill), and inspired me to think about graduate school as a serious vocation. There are a lot of professional philosophers, who claim that all that matters in philosophy is our written record (and, perhaps, our teaching). But Hugo showed that one can sometimes become a better philosopher and teacher by living a philosophical life in the polity and work for justice (often against much, very hostile opposition). I have come to appreciate that in doing so Hugo reconnected philosophy to an earlier ideal: the work had to be evaluated alongside the life lived.
Before I conclude, I just want to point out that despite his focus on death penalty related issues, Hugo was an extremely versatile philosopher: an early paper (co-authored with Oppenheim [there should be an Oppenheim-index in philosophy!] also unmentioned in the obituaries) on complimentary in quantum mechanics received high praise from Patrick Suppes. My condolences to his whole family, especially, Constance, of course, and his son, Mark Bedau--one of our philosophical own--as well as to all his former colleagues at Tufts.
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