In Memoriam: Peter H. Hare ( SUNY Buffalo) 1935 - 2008

By now most of our readership will be aware of the passing of SUNY-Buffalo Distinguished Professor (emeritus) of philosophy, Dr.  Peter H. Hare. Buffalo Philosophy is pleased to have the opportunity to post the following in-depth personal, professional, and philosophical appraisal and remembrance of Dr.  Hare, which has been sent to us by Dr. Randall Dipert, Charles Sanders Peirce Professor of American Philosopy at the University at Buffalo. We welcome other comments/memories of from Dr. Hare's former colleagues, students, and friends. 

Peter Hewitt Hare (1935-2008)

A Personal Remembrance

Although Peter died quietly in his sleep on the morning of January 3rd, obituaries of him have been slow in appearing.  There are many who have known Peter and his family longer than I, both in the Department and the philosophical community, but I did have the benefit of knowing him since 1977, and very well since 1998.  I have had many extended conversations with Peter and there was even a letter from him in my mailbox (written before Christmas) when I went to the office at the beginning of this semester.  There were many points of intersection between Peter and myself, both philosophical and non-philosophical.  Of the most impact for me personally was that he endowed a professorship at the University at Buffalo, and handpicked me as its first occupant, which he named the Charles S. Peirce Professorship of American Philosophy.  To do so, he made a bequest of $500,000 to the UB Foundation in 1998; he also donated a separate $500,000 for the benefit of the University, the Department, and especially the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.

       Peter was without doubt, at his death, the unofficial “dean” of American philosophy.  He was a tireless supporter, officer, and in many cases a co-founder of numerous professional organizations dedicated to Peirce, pragmatism, William James, and American Philosophy in general (such as the Society for the Advancement of the American Philosophy, SAAP—founded in 1972, with Peter active in it since 1973).  He was very proud that he had gone to (nearly?) every meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association since the 1960’s, and every meeting of the Charles S. Peirce Society, which met in conjunction with the Eastern Division meeting, since 1965 if not before, the founding year of the Transactions. (The Society itself was founded in 1946.)  He was a consulting editor of the Transactions 1971-4 and co-editor from 1974 until his unexpected death in apparently good health at age 72, a span of 34 years.  For the last decades he had been the editor in charge of non-Peirce submissions, the book review editor, and the de facto managing editor.  He had more or less secretly subsidized the Transactions and Society for some years, and endowed the yearly Peirce Essay Prize from his own pocket.  In the last 10 years, accelerating with his retirement in 2001, he literally traveled the globe attending virtually every professional meeting or session having to do with American philosophy, giving papers or chairing sessions, and especially encouraging younger scholars.

       I do not remember exactly when I first saw or met Peter, perhaps in Amsterdam at the Peirce conference in 1976, and certainly by the fall of 1977.  In 1977 I took my first job at SUNY Fredonia, and since it was only an hour from Buffalo, two area philosophical attractions at the University at Buffalo (“UB”) were the active Logic Colloquium and Peter Hare in American philosophy.  For a time before that, UB had boasted two or three Americanists including Peter and Edward Madden.  I do remember the impression Peter made.  He was a short, extremely energetic man, then sporting what we called “muttonchops” and wearing a bowtie.  There was a bit of a contradiction in these last two, the latter making him look like a retro Ivy League type, and the former making him look very contemporary for the 70’s.  He was lively to an extent that almost seemed nervous (which he usually wasn’t) and he talked very fast; he was utterly approachable and friendly, again belying the professorial bowtie and sport jacket.

       Peter was from an important family in American history; he was also a wealthy man, arising from inheritance, the dual university incomes of himself and his first wife Daphne, and from wise investments.  He wore both facts very lightly on his shoulder.  He was pained to keep his frequent, extensive financial support of philosophical organizations, publications, conferences, and activities in the Department as secret as possible.  The exception was his gift of 1,000,000 to UB near his retirement and in memory of his beloved first wife, Daphne.  On his mother’s side, Peter was related to the Quartermaster General in the Civil War, Montgomery C. Meigs, who was himself a great-grandson of the illustrious colonel in the Revolutionary War, Return J. Meigs Sr.  Montgomery Meigs is cited by some historians as being the most important contributor to the eventual Union victory through his management of supply lines and logistics.  Peter was a cousin of Montgomery C. Meigs IV, a recently retired 4-star general in the U.S. Army and currently a professor at Georgetown University.  We talked about this Meigs especially in the last months because he knew I was interested.  General Meigs, in a role that is for now largely classified, successfully led a multi-billion dollar initiative to develop countermeasures to the IEDs plaguing the U.S. military efforts in OIF and OAF in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively.  (It is highly likely that these countermeasures saved my son’s life in an encounter in Northern Iraq with an IED that failed to explode.)  These relatives of Peter’s are only a few who played a role in American history.

     Peter’s father was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, as were others on his father’s side of the family.  The generals Meigs, and others, on his mother’s side, were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  A notion of civic duty seems to have run very deep in the Hares and Meigs, and this is surely at least one source of Peter’s extraordinary, lifelong dedication to various noble causes: the promotion of American philosophy, of reason itself, of internationalizing philosophy, and of secular humanism (through his long association with Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Press, and the Center for Inquiry). 

     Peter grew up in New York City, in a townhouse on 14th Street, where his father was a significant architect and correspondent of Frank Lloyd Wright—and who also died suddenly.  Until his move to Connecticut after retirement and his remarriage to the poet and fellow UB professor Susan Howe, Peter’s favorite place to stay in New York  City was the Hotel Chelsea, near his boyhood home.  In addition to travel, usually in support of some academic endeavor or organization, and perhaps because of the family’s naval history, Peter enjoyed sailing on Lake Erie as a hobby—for a number of years he co-owned a sailboat with his close intergenerational friend David Koepsell, who was the son of his longtime assistant and friend while he served as chair of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, Eva Koepsell.

     Peter was an exceptionally—astonishingly—even-tempered and patient human being, even in the most trying arguments and situations.  At the same time—perhaps because of his family’s long association with military and financial strategy—he had very concrete and firm ideas about what was good for the direction of American philosophy, philosophy in the U.S., and the Department and University at Buffalo.  The combination of these attributes, even during lengthy periods of fiscal crisis in New York State and SUNY, and in stewarding the Department of Philosophy that saw its fulltime faculty go from almost 40 to 15, caused Peter never to lose a vision about what philosophy at Buffalo was and could be.  This vision was roughly one of “doing philosophy historically” (also the name of one of Peter’s better-named conferences).  The specific areas of philosophy that Peter saw as almost uniquely done in a historical way at Buffalo were metaphysics, logic, phenomenology, and of course his own greatest interest, American philosophy and pragmatism.

       Cautiously and patiently, he kept these areas of excellence together, either by the occasional—often extremely crafty—hires, by nurturing, encouraging, and hectoring colleagues already at UB, and in the long periods of little hiring, by organizing large-scale national and international conferences at UB.  We only now can see that these efforts were carefully engineered, with a single conception that was pursued over decades, and often by using—as discreetly as possible—his own personal funds.  Although remarkably generous with his own financial resources, and except perhaps for extensive travel and a large house that he and Daphne extensively used for “targeted” entertaining, Peter had a modest lifestyle. He usually drove a smallish American car, and generally avoided expensive restaurants and especially hotels (except perhaps for the Chelsea); the banquets and lodging for his largely privately funded conferences were generous but never lavish, and he cringed if he thought he might be overpaying even major philosophical stars to come to Buffalo.

     Peter’s flaws, as nearly as I could see, were few and smallscale.  He could chatter a bit much.  Maybe he really was sometimes nervous.  After his retirement, he dedicated himself to the Transactions and American philosophy, also taking a new or renewed interest in poetry and architecture.  He had time on his hands and at first liked spontaneously  to call me or write me emails; I on the other hand still had to teach, still had children at home, and eventually had a serious illness and chronic pain.  I became less patient with him and he once, when I was completely sedated, insisted to my wife that I speak with him on the phone.  This now seems a very tiny matter indeed, and I wish I had him back to converse at greater length.  He was particularly useful for ideas on conferences and the direction of the Department.  The thing that he did that made me most unhappy, then and later, but which I could not begrudge him, was to retire in 2001 when he was 66 and to leave the area.  This left me with a poor idea of the day-to-day runnings of the Transactions, and with no suggestions for referees and quick advice on manuscripts.  He had hoped to inspire others to retire at an appropriate age and for the Department to renew itself naturally.  Because of his personality, and long chairmanship that was recognized by almost everyone as spectacularly successful, he turns out to have held the Department together, making slow progress and changing, but with little friction.  In the Department, no one other than the chair apparently has since felt obligated to attend almost every paper and every local conference, to read papers beforehand if available, and to keep a question period alive if need be.        

     One might get the idea reading between my lines or in reading other accounts of his life that Peter was a kind of philosophical gadfly and impresario, and while encouraging others in philosophical activity, was not himself a first-rate philosopher.  That would be far from the truth.  He was a superbly and broadly educated human being, the product of the best private school, and of Yale (B.A.) and Columbia (PhD) in their heydays.  He was no light-hearted student either and the family traditions of duty and honor must have weighed on him heavily at times (although he didn’t show it).  It is apparent that he approached study—and later thinking, and scholarly writing and editing--more like a West Point cadet or a Naval Academy midshipman than like a wealthy frat boy from a distinguished family.  But he was also a great deal more than the driven, nose-to-the-grindstone, pure-pursuit-of-excellence types that marks some (but hardly all) West Pointers I have known.  Peter was a superb philosopher, a very clear thinker and writer, with as much natural curiosity as almost anyone I have encountered.  I think of myself as a bit of a connoisseur of academic philosophy talks, and I used to compare carefully and harshly every lecture I heard.  Peter gave one of the best I ever heard, "Problems and Prospects in the Ethics of Belief," a Presidential Address for the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Buffalo,  March 3, 1990. (This is doubly etched in my mind, because my first son lay ill at Buffalo Children’s Hospital and died two days later.)

     He had penetrating thoughts about almost every talk we heard or every essay we read together.  He would not always publicly make these points in the open discussion period after a talk, or if he did, the speaker and others sometimes missed the point—which true to his personality, were never delivered with the excessive and lacerating confidence that gets people’s attention.  Instead, he would scurry up to a questioner or speaker he agreed with, or to a friend he knew was also listening carefully, and would artfully summarize or condense what the most acute comments about the talk were or could have been.  Unlike many historians of philosophy, he was keenly interested in the substance of the philosophical issue, and not only the who-had-said-exactly-what; he was particularly insightful and knowledgeable about topics in epistemology and metaphysics, but he was no slouch either about more technical issues in logic or philosophy of language.

     Peter and I had some odd things in common.  American philosophy and Peirce, to be sure—although one of my passions that has not emerged in my writing is for William James, probably his favorite philosopher.  James was apparently a far gentler personality than Peirce, and I was a bit like the prickly Peirce to Peter’s James.  We also both had an interest in American history generally, with a curious shared interest in military history that was centered on the famous service academies (his from his family, mine from working with so many officers in the U.S. Army).  Although he was reticent to talk too much about his family history, I was genuinely fascinated by it, and he would oblige.  Curiously he had had the same spinal problem I did, and the same surgery, but had recovered without difficulty.   We both had daughters named “Gwendolyn.”  We both sailed.  Peter’s mother had graduated from Barnard and my daughter Gwen went to Barnard, and this fact and that it was still an all-girls school somehow tickled him.

     When I first heard on the phone of Peter’s death from the longtime Department of Philosophy secretary, Judy Wagner, I was (like so many probably) stunned and speechless.  There were many things I had wanted to talk about with him. He has played such an important (if sometimes, annoying) role in my life in the last decade. 72 seems quite young in my Department.  This good man was suddenly gone.  But then I stammered “… You know, Judy, he had an almost perfect life.”  Of course there were undoubtedly many things he still wanted to do, including getting the Transactions and the direction of American philosophy on an ever more secure footing.  Travel, more time with his two children, more conferences to relish.  Most tragic is the short time he had to spend with his second wife, Susan Howe, who was so perfect for him, with whom he seemed to enjoy so much their new life together, and who had lifted him in the dark few years after Daphne was taken from him by a long illness.  But still, he had the almost perfect life.

 

--Randall R. Dipert

C.S. Peirce Professor of American Philosophy

Co-editor (with Peter Hare, 2000-2008) of the Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society