From: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT
Editor: James G. Buickerood
In Memory of John W. Yolton
November 10, 1921 – November 3, 2005
John W. Yolton, John Locke Professor of the History of Philosophy, Emeritus, of Rutgers University, died of cardiac arrest Thursday, 3 November 2005 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Born to a civil engineer and piano teacher in Birmingham, Alabama on 10 November 1921, Yolton spent most of his youth in Cincinnati, Ohio where he received his early education. He graduated B.A. with honors in philosophy from the University of Cincinnati in June 1945, and remained there to work with Julius R. Weinberg another year, completing his M.A. thesis, “British Empiricism and Our Knowledge of the External World,” in June 1946. John married Jean Sebastian in September 1945, initiating an intimate partnership that shaped and informed his teaching, research, and writing life, commemorated in his numerous book dedications to her.
Following three years of graduate study (notably with Edward W. Strong) and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Yolton won a Fulbright Grant to Balliol College, Oxford, where, under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle, he conducted the research in 1950-52 that resulted in his D.Phil. thesis, “John Locke and the Way of Ideas; a Study of the impact of Locke’s Epistemology and Metaphysics upon his Contemporaries.” Four years later this study, dedicated to Weinberg, was published in Oxford University Press’s Classical and Philosophical Monographs series as John Locke and the Way of Ideas. The book identified the targets of Locke’s critique of innate ideas and principles, and put Book 1 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding in a completely new light. It was and remains today seminal; and together with contemporaneous research on Locke by Wolfgang von Leyden and Peter Laslett, it inaugurated the first serious, sustained, and rigorous program of study of that philosopher’s thought and influence that continues to this day.
After leaving Oxford, Yolton held a number of teaching and administrative posts of varying duration at The Johns Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, Princeton University, Kenyon College, and the University of Maryland. He joined York University, Toronto, as Professor and founding Chairman of the Department of Philosophy in 1963. He guided the Philosophy Department during its formative years until 1973 when he became Acting President of the University for a year and a half. He also served as Acting Dean of the Graduate School in 1967-68. His profound pedagogic and administrative mark on York continues to be recognized and appreciated. His contribution is now celebrated in York’s biennial lecture series, “Weighing the Scales of Locke,” inaugurated in 2003 on the occasion of John and Jean Yolton’s bequest of his magnificent rare book collection to the University. In 1978, Yolton departed for Rutgers University as Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Rutgers College. Having contributed as Dean
to the reorganization of the university faculty, he stepped down from the decanal position in 1985, but continued to teach in the philosophy department until his retirement in 1992, holding the first named chair in that department. He taught graduates and undergraduates with equal deftness and enthusiasm, and while at Rutgers found time to teach junior and senior scholars in his Folger Institute of Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies seminar, “Space and Time, Matter and Mind.” As a department, college, and university administrative officer, Yolton was, as H. Ian Macdonald of York University has observed, naturally “quiet, fair-minded and respected” – qualities equally characteristic of his teaching, scholarly, and personal life.
It was as a teacher, colleague, and scholar that John Yolton was most well recognized, appreciated, and beloved. And it is as a teacher, colleague, and scholar that he will be most intensely missed. His graduate seminars were characterized by an informal, collective examination of texts and issues, introducing young philosophers to the rigors of careful textual analysis and interpretative argument. Students were often pleasantly taken aback by the extensive, probing, critical and encouraging typed comments they received from John within days of their submission of research papers to him. As a teacher, Yolton was unfailingly generous with his time, energy, knowledge and even on occasion his invaluable research library. In fact, this generosity was so extensive as to be difficult to reconcile with his prodigious output
as a writer, reviewer, referee, and scholarly correspondent. Yolton’s love of philosophy and scholarship inhibited any impulse to produce clones of his students, and a great many of them have made their contributions to fields other than philosophy or its history. Nevertheless, a number of John’s students still work in the history of modern philosophy, including the University of Toronto graduate, Henry Schankula; University of Maryland undergraduate Wade Robison; York undergraduate Peter Loptson; the four York graduates to whom John dedicated his influential studies, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1983) and Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (1984): John P. Wright, Shadia Drury, Sylvana Tomaselli, and Stephen Ford; and Rutgers graduate, James G. Buickerood.
John’s teaching was not restricted to seminars, lecture halls or formal institutes. He devoted much energy to the encouragement of younger scholars, whose work he commented on extensively. Michael Ayers, author of influential studies of Locke and Berkeley, related in 1991 how his fortuitous meeting with John at Oxford years earlier contributed to the beginnings and sustenance of his own work on Locke: “John’s remarkable knowledge of the primary philosophical literature and his infectious enthusiasm carried me into the then small world of serious Locke studies, a world which already owed much to him and has come to owe much more.” Similar reminiscences could readily be had from a great many other philosophical scholars, working on Hume, Descartes, Arnauld, Malebranche, as well as many lesser-known figures in the history of philosophy. He also inspired numerous scholars working in history, literature, political science, art history and other disciplines, to whom Yolton was an indefatigable mentor, critic and friend; these include Christopher Fox, John C. O’Neal, Barbara Stafford, and Peter Walmsley. Whatever the venue, John brought to his teaching and to his scholarship the rare qualities of unaffected generosity, genuine interest in the work of others, imaginative philosophical vision, openness to radically new interpretations, and rigorous textual discipline. Some sense of his approach to cooperative textual study can be gleaned especially from his 1977 Locke Reader, now lamentably out of print.
From his earliest publication in 1948 (“A Defense of Sense Data”), to his last, in 2005 (“Logic as ‘those right helps of Art’ in the Dutch Republic”), Yolton covered the span of the history of philosophy and much of the range of theoretical philosophy with varying emphases. His strictly theoretical work focused primarily on epistemic issues of perception, concept acquisition and formation, action theory, and metaphysical analysis as broadly consonant with the empirical tradition as it had developed from his beloved seventeenth century to the later twentieth. He pursued, in effect, what would now be called a research program signaled in embryonic form by his M.A. thesis. John was an early advocate of the philosophical appropriation of work in psychological theory and research, particularly by Jean Piaget and J.J. Gibson, in a series of papers on perception and action theory and in his 1962 Thinking and Perceiving. An interest in the philosophy of George Santayana stemming from his undergraduate days, led to a correspondence with that philosopher and a number of related essays, reviews, and editorial
introductions.
Through the 1950s and 1960s John published a series of essays on Locke on ideas, experience, the law of nature, knowledge of body, and science of nature. These studies culminated in the innovative Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (1970), the book that revealed the still-developing depth and lineaments of Yolton’s textually rigorous and provocative understanding of that philosopher. In it he established the central place of natural history in Locke’s conception of science, and explained the role of the corpuscularian hypothesis in his thought. Yolton also further developed his interpretations of Locke’s theory of knowledge, his theory of agency, and his moral philosophy. Henceforth, John’s work commanded the attention of everyone working in the field. While he became known in particular for the theses of his 1956 and 1970 books, John’s repeated approaches to Locke’s work over the years were fresh
undertakings, begun with minimal preconception. A special interest – one that informed his daily life in the classroom – to which he returned repeatedly was Locke’s view of education. John and Jean’s 1989 Clarendon edition of Some Thoughts concerning Education was preceded by his diminutive yet surprisingly comprehensive monograph, John Locke and Education, by some eighteen years and exhibited significantly different emphases and lines of approach to that subject than he had explored in the earlier treatment.
Locke: An Introduction appeared in 1985, an introductory exploration of its subject’s thought and life conceived entirely on John’s own terms. (How many introductory studies of major philosophers open with a mystery and a romance like ‘the red trunk’ and ‘Philoclea and Philander’?) Again, 1993’s Locke Dictionary is an uncommon instantiation of its kind. This work publicizes in extenso John’s deep conviction in the merits of compiling a dictionary of an author’s works in the effort to learn precisely what he says in order to understand what he means. John’s final book, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke (2004) once again shows its author’s fresh engagement with long-familiar texts and issues. It is a startling and suggestive examination of concepts and themes long overlooked by students of Locke. It is indubitably provocative, and will doubtless instigate wide-ranging and fruitful debate – like most of Yolton’s scholarship; like good scholarship should.
Yolton’s 1983 book on early modern theories of perception from Descartes to Reid has inspired a vigorous debate on the historical accuracy and intelligibility of the ‘veil of ideas’ doctrine attributed to his predecessors by the latter philosopher. Can Descartes and Locke really be read as direct realists, as Yolton has provocatively suggested? His 1984 book on the British legacy of Locke’s suggestion that matter could think was complemented by his 1991 study, Locke and French Materialism. In these works John raised the question of the role of physiological models in eighteenth-century accounts of thought and action, and of the role of the passive matter doctrine shared by Cartesians and Newtonians alike in the resilience of eighteenth-century dualism. Can Priestley’s materialism be attributed to developments in later eighteenth-century matter theory that postulated the essential activity of matter, as Yolton has suggested?
The productivity of John’s post-retirement years was truly remarkable. It resulted inter alia in two highly creative books — Perception and Reality (1996), and Realism and Appearances (2000). In both books, as in his earlier exchange with Richard Rorty over early modern accounts of perceptual cognition and their relevance to assumptions and principles motivating twentieth-century accounts, John shows his sensitive engagement with contemporary philosophical debate. In these two books, the views of writers such as Paul Churchland, Colin McGinn, and John McDowell interact with the early modern positions of Arnauld, Malebranche, Locke, Hume and Kant in fascinating and illuminating philosophical exchanges.
Through his nearly sixty-year career, John was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was the first recipient of the Leonard Nelson Essay Contest; the Association internationale de collaboration scientifique awarded him the A.S. Eddington Essay Contest prize; and the University of California, Berkeley awarded him the F.C.S. Schiller Prize. His honorary degrees include an LL.D. from York University, and D.Litt. from McMaster University.
John Yolton is survived by his wife Jean Yolton of Piscataway, NJ; two daughters, Karen Griffith of Corpus Christi, TX, and Pamela H. Smith of Toronto, Canada; and two granddaughters, Emily and Jane Griffith. John’s death has grieved scholars and friends on four continents.
James G. Buickerood and John P. Wright