My dissertation advisor, David Solomon, passed away last week. It’s hard to express how fortunate I was to know David and to be his student. David was a consummate teacher; a brilliant, humane, and inspiring philosopher; a kind, generous, wise, and supportive mentor; and a deeply winsome person.

I did not plan to specialize in ethics when I came to Notre Dame. I had some interest in ethics, but then, I had some interest in a lot of areas. Compared to many of my fellow grad students, I was as green as green could be.

Then I took David’s 20th Century Ethics class, a class required for all philosophy graduate students. I did have some pre-existing interest in virtue ethics; but this class and David’s teaching and way of doing philosophy was transformative for me. I still didn’t know after I took the class that I wanted to work on ethics. But I knew I wanted to do philosophy the way David did, and I was captivated by the philosophical possibilities the class opened for me.

David directed more dissertations - more than 40 - than anyone else in the history of the Notre Dame philosophy department, one of the largest philosophy departments in the world. When I was a student it seemed like he was always shepherding 5 or more of us through some stage of the process. And he was also serving as the founding director of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture which was (and remains) a vibrant part of intellectual life at Notre Dame, and puts on an extroardinary annual conference (which I’ve seen referred to online as “Catholic Woodstock.”)

I’ve tried recounting his mentorship and influence, and it’s too extensive to try to capture. It’s overwhelming, really. But hopefully these remembrances and reflections give some picture of a great and kind and good man.

2014 Conference and the story of a “Rough-Hewn” Graduate Student

I defended my dissertation in 2010 - with Herculean support from David - almost two years after starting my first academic job. In 2014, another of David’s students got in touch with his former students to organize a conference at Notre Dame in his honor. The keynotes would be given by prominent friends of David’s (Alasdair MacIntyre, John Haldane, and Nancy Snow) and the rest of the papers and commenters were to be given by his former Ph.D. students. The fact that you could do that, and that it could be such a memorable and interesting conference is itself a testament to David’s legacy as a doctoral advisor to so many terrific people and moral philosophers.1

In addition to the excellent philosophy at the conference, it was a testament to his legacy in other ways. Many of us had not met each other before, but we had heard David speak so glowingly of his students, that this conference was like a “homecoming.” Yes, I reconnected with friends who I knew from grad school days. But I also connected with several of David’s students I hadn’t met, and it was like meeting old friends. We had all been so deeply formed by David that it was the most natural thing in the world to build these new friendships.

At the closing banquet, David came to the mic, and was in typical amiable, funny, brilliant form. He said he didn’t want the conference because “people would think I’m retiring” but he was clearly pleased with a conference that was such a testament to his legacy as a philosopher and teacher.

He told great stories and was full of good-natured jabs for the attendees. And he closed with this story:

David had recently been a visiting faculty member at Baylor (his undergraduate alma mater) and he taught a seminar on virtue ethics. I knew that a former undergraduate student of mine (Nathan Cartagena - now a terrific philosopher and faculty member at Wheaton College) had taken the class. So my ears perked up when he recounted:

“I was teaching an ethics class at Baylor and went out to dinner with some of the students. One of them was enthusiastic, and a bit rough-hewn - he reminded me of DiQuattro when he first started. So I asked him who he was, what he had done, and he said ‘I was one of DiQuattro’s students at Grove City.’ And Nathan and I got along and understood each other very well.”

It was a simple story, but told with David’s characteristic flair. And the reveal that this “rough-hewn” Baylor student who reminded him of DiQuattro was indeed my former student got a nice reaction. And I think it expressed David’s appreciation for his students and the legacy of his teaching and mentorship. Of all the things David could have recounted about his career and his students, “I met this interesting grad student who it turns out was one of DiQuattro’s former students” needn’t have been high on the list. But David appreciated it, and I appreciated that it meant enough to him to mention it at the banquet.

The entire conference was extremely memorable, and, I think, meaningful for everyone involved. Here’s a couple pictures that capture some of the joy and camaraderie of the conference:

More remembrances

David’s mentorship meant so much more than I could summarize, but here’s a catalogue of some of the ways he influenced and supported me and my work:

• He gave me space in the Ethics Center offices over Winter Break so that I could intensively revise my dissertation and have it ready to defend on time.

  • I got my first job with one dissertation chapter written and (with much encouragement from David) left for Pennsylvania with 4 chapters written. But a year and a half later I was newly married, with a draft of a dissertation that needed to be revised, submitted, and accepted, and defended within a few months. “Write to David” suggested my wise wife, “see if he has space in the Ethics Center offices for you to revise during Winter Break.”

  • David graciously offered me an open office, and I got to work. David was his typically welcoming, supportive, and engaging self during what was something of an intrusion into the ethics center offices. (One memorable part of the trip was having cake in the Ethics Center Conference room for Alasdair MacIntyre’s 81st birthday - a much quieter affair (so I assume) than the conference and bash in Ireland for MacIntyre’s 80th, but memorable for me.)

• He met with me weekly - as he did with his many other doctoral students - when I was studying for my Oral exam, the last hurdle before the dissertation stage. As I’m sure others can attest, he made the most of these meetings to discuss philosophy, but also to get to know us and support us not just as scholars but as whole people.

• When I could not get my dissertation proposal off the ground, he told me, “Write a letter home to your mother about the main idea.” That worked (as my mom can attest - I took David literally and sent mom a copy to read over.)

• “You should write a short book about Augustine and ethics” - so said David when we met to discuss a chapter draft of my dissertation. This memory is a bit bittersweet, as no such book has come to fruition. But the affirmation of my work was important; and the idea is continuing to animate my research and writing. (As I’ve written about a bit on the stack):

What I'm Working On: Augustinian Eudaimonism

David

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July 18, 2023

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• When I graduated from Notre Dame, David held a party at his house for his students who were graduating. He invited us, his other students “and your families who are in town with you.” Well, he failed to account for this Jersey Italian having an entourage of 15 with me for the graduation. I don’t know how it was settled among us that we’d all be going - I think I’ve blocked it out - but we rolled up to his house like extras in a Scorcese movie; David could not have been more welcoming and gracious (and seemed amused by the whole thing).

  • After the graduation, David later stopped by the graduation party we had organized for my family and friends. It was great to chat with him and my Dad, especially because David told Dad highly complimentary (and mostly untrue2) things about what a great philosopher I was.

  • (David did not miss an opportunity to advocate for and compliment his students. I attended a conference where he was the keynote speaker, and he found a way in his remarks to fit in absurdly complimentary comments about my dissertation.)

• In 2011, Marianne and I, along with my sister (age 15 at the time) did a panel presentation at David’s ethics center conference (my parents also attended, along with a few of my undergraduate students - a very memorable time). Again, David seemed pleased by the whole thing - I think my sister was the first high schooler to present at the conference. David was engaging and asked my sister some tough questions about Jane Austen (her paper was about adaptations of Austen).

As a Teacher and Scholar

• It’s impossible to summarize how much David has influenced both my thinking and my teaching. His voice is always at least at the periphery of my mind when I’m writing, and when I’m teaching. I’ve had many great teachers, but I’ve consciously and unconsciously emulated his teaching approach more than any other.

  • Like many others, I TA’d for David’s popular undergraduate class “Morality and Modernity.” So much of what I do in the classroom is deeply shaped by this class. I’m sure I learned as much from it as the undergraduates who were fortunate enough to take it.

Virtue Ethics: Radical or Routine?

• David’s academic focus was “virtue ethics” but that doesn’t do justice to his transformative approach to ethical reflection: one that was humane, conscious of its history, conversant with literature, culture, and history, and with classical and theological reflection on the nature of life and what it means to be human. One concerned with speaking to our cultural moment and predicament, as well as enduring human concerns. It was comparatively less concerned with using virtue as a theoretical aid to “define right action.” Indeed, David lamented the trend of making virtue ethics one more player in modern normative theory while ignoring the ways early proponents of an ethics of virtue (MacIntyre, Murdoch, Anscombe) called for a wholesale reconsideration of the very enterprise of moral philosophy, and sharply critiqued “modern moral philosophy” as a whole. He gently pressed that these are two very distinct ways to do “virtue ethics” in his article: “Virtue Ethics: Radical or Routine?”3 In that article, he wrote:

  Notice, however, that in thus characterizing the nature of the differences among competing normative theories, they are also treated as remarkably similar. Each theory will place some notion in the privileged place and presumably will have a structure similar to the other theories. There is certainly the suggestion that the fundamental notion in each theory will have to serve the same functions—essentially of motivating and justifying particular actions. While there will certainly be differences among these different theories when characterized in this way, the differences do not seem to go very deep. They can be made to seem like matters of mere theoretical convenience as if we were choosing between alternative axiom sets for a formal system.

  Now contrast this way of characterizing the differences between virtue ethics and its opponents with a second way which involves differences of much greater variety and depth. Many advocates of virtue ethics—including Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe—have drawn the contrast between virtue ethics and its modern opponents in a much more complicated way. Here are just some of the themes that run through much of contemporary virtue ethics and are seen by many of its advocates as central to their advocacy of virtue in preference to the neo-Kantian and consequentialist alternatives:

  1. A suspicion of rules and principles as adequate to guiding human action in the complex and variegated situations in which human agents find themselves.

  2. A rejection of conscientiousness as the appropriate motivational state in the best human action.

  3. A turn for an understanding of the ethical life to concrete terms like the virtue terms in preference to more abstract terms like ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘ought’.

  4. A critique of modernity and especially the models of practical rationality that underlie such Enlightenment theories as Kantian deontology and Benthamite consequentialism. This critique frequently extends to the bureaucratic and impersonal features of many central modern social practices.

  5. An emphasis on the importance of community, especially local communities, both in introducing human beings to the ethical life and sustaining their practice of central features of that life. This emphasis is typically contrasted with the individualism that seems to many advocates of virtue ethics to permeate Kantian and consequentialist approaches to ethics.

Suffice to say, I think moral philosophers need to take more seriously David’s appeal to see classical ethics as providing much more than a useful theoretical tool to analyze right action.

Requiescat in Pace

David was a great philosopher, and he was also a deeply kind, generous, and supportive mentor. It’s one of the great privileges of my life to have been his student. May light perpetual shine upon him.

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