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Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Gary Gutting (1942-2019)

Gary Gutting, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, died this past Friday.

Professor Gutting worked on philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, contemporary French philosophy, and contemporary analytic philosophy.

He was well-known for his substantial work in public philosophy, authoring several columns and conducting a number of interviews with philosophers for The Stonefeature in The New York Times. Also, he was the creator and a long-time co-editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR).

Among other things, Professor Gutting was interested in showing what different kinds of philosophers—for example, theists and atheists, analytic and continental philosophers—could learn from one another. He wrote that he found it encouraging that there were signs of “philosophers following philosophical problems wherever they are interestingly discussed, regardless of the author’s methodology, orientation or style.”

Professor Gutting received his PhD in philosophy from St. Louis University in 1968.

In a column for The Stone, “Why Do I Teach?“, he wrote that a central aim of college education, particularly in the humanities , is to “make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name” and that “we should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates. Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival, flaring up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls.”

Professor Gutting was once asked about the role of philosophy in a world in crisis. He answered:

I learned long ago from Candide that both optimism and pessimism are just ways of avoiding the work of improving the world. For optimism, improvement is unnecessary, for pessimism it’s impossible. But it always makes sense to do what we can to make things better in our immediate locale, where we have some reasonable chance of alleviating what Voltaire rightly saw as the three great evils of vice, poverty, and boredom. It might seem that philosophy would have little relevance to such immediate and mundane concerns, and it’s true that theory, high or deep, won’t tell us how to work in our gardens. But effective action requires accurate thought, and in our culture at least, the basic ideas we need for thinking trickle down from philosophy, as do the methods of thinking well.

You can read a detailed interview with Professor Gutting here, view his writings for The New York Times here, and browse a listing of his philosophical work here.

Daily Nous

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THE STONE
In Memoriam: What Would Gary Gutting Do?

The influential philosopher and educator, who died Friday, exemplified the spirit of engagement, uncompromising thought and civility we need today.

By Peter Catapano

Mr. Catapano is the editor of The Stone.
Jan. 21, 2019

When Americans lament the loss of civility in public discourse, the nobility of purpose in education and the ability to reach across contentious political and ideological divides — or just flat out wonder why we all can’t just get along and learn from one another — they are talking about the loss of people like Gary Gutting.

Professor Gutting died on Friday at the age of 76. He was a beloved philosopher and educator — an emeritus professor at Notre Dame, an editor, along with his wife, Anastasia Friel Gutting, known as Stacie, of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews; the author of several books, and of some 70 op-eds, essays and interviews published here at The Stone. He developed his work for The Times into two well-received books, “What Philosophy Can Do” and “Talking God,” a series of interviews with philosophers on religious belief. He is the most prominently featured author in our print collection “The Stone Reader.”

Gary was actively involved with The Stone from its inception in 2010. His first essay, “Philosophy and Faith,” appeared on Aug. 1, 2010, and stirred a broad and energetic debate; his last, a response to readers ofhis December essay on affirmative action, was completed at home after a recent stay at the hospital, and published a few weeks ago, on Jan. 3. It was, fittingly, not a manifesto, but a conversation.




In his prolific output in the nearly nine years between those two pieces, Gary fearlessly and calmly entered some of the nation’s most contentious debates — over religious belief and atheism, racism, politics, the morality of patriotism, the purpose of education.

Gary’s devotion to The Stone and its mission of making philosophy useful and meaningful to the broader public was, like him, unwavering, reliable, consistent, marked by an unmistakable clarity of language and a respect for the reader of any background. In my view, he practically invented the prevailing form of the philosophical op-ed. Over time, the phrase “a Gary Gutting piece” became part of my own editorial vocabulary.

But Gary was much more than a regular contributor to The Stone. He was an adviser and mentor to both me and The Stone’s co-founder and moderator, the philosopher Simon Critchley, who first met and worked with Gary at Notre Dame more than 15 years ago. Simon described Gary’s work well as “a properly American voice, clear, without ever being shrill, tolerant without ever being uncritical, and instinctively committed to the idea that philosophy could be communicated to a larger public audience.” He would also, when speaking of Gary, most often refer to him as “a prince.”

The most bitter cultural arguments in American intellectual life were comfortable places for Gary — or perhaps he saw them as opportunities — and I believe that he entered in them not so much to establish the dominance of his own view — as a believer in God, in humanistic education, or in the promise of the United States — but to help put the debates on sane ground, to level them through reason and friendly engagement, to be a peacemaker and to advance the invaluable work of civil public discourse and argument.

I was honored to play the role of Gary’s editor, nominally a position of some authority, but to be honest — and I must do that here if I am to pay proper respect on the profoundly sad occasion of his death — I was more his student. Over the years, as Gary’s involvement in The Stone waned and he returned to his students and writing books, I often found myself considering the merit of a certain idea or argument, or wondering about the philosophical soundness of a particular essay. I would quite literally ask, sometimes out loud, “What would Gary do?” I would then think hard about that and try to act accordingly. But when I got stuck, I would write or call him for guidance — a session, I might call it. The pleasure of those calls came not just from having my thinking clarified and gently set right by a person wiser than me, but also from hearing once again his reassuring, friendly, articulate Midwestern tenor, and what seemed to be his endlessly renewable excitement about people and ideas.

A digestible portion of Gary’s thinking on his work and career can be found at 3AM Magazine in this 2012 interview with Richard Marshall. And this quote from that talk is as good as any to return to now, as a reminder of the continual work he saw as necessary for remaining true to both ourselves and to the world around us: “Our fundamental beliefs don’t need intellectual justification, but they do need intellectual maintenance. We need to understand their implications, modify them to eliminate internal contradictions, defend and perhaps modify them in response to objections.”

A very small selection of Gary’s work is below, in memory of a great thinker and friend, and in hopes that new readers will take something useful away from time spent with the letter and spirit of his life’s work.

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