I approached Jonathan to be my thesis supervisor in 1970 when I was 23. Jonathan (as it seemed) hesitated. But we fell into an intense discussion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , after which I found I had a supervisor.
The life of a graduate student can feel like being stuck on a high wire, unable to move forward or backward. Yet whenever I entered 13 Longwall St., and climbed the stairs to Jonathan’s study (maneuvering around the bicycles in the hallway), I felt back on solid ground. Jonathan’s focus was to explore my ideas incisively and critically, but always with understanding and in a spirit of equality. Looking back, I realize Jonathan never referred to his published work, even when we were discussing issues about which he had written extensively (such as free will and responsibility). He must have felt that to interpose his own published view would have curbed the egalitarian spirit of our conversations. When I left 13 Longwall into the busy Oxford traffic, I invariably felt buoyed about my work, student
anxieties temporarily lifted.
There is a lot of pure fun in Jonathan. My wife and I have many happy memories of cycling with the Glovers to their favorite Soho café, watching old Ealing Studio comedies, and going for walks in London and Oxford. But to be Jonathan’s friend is also to know that he is haunted by our species’ cruelty, and by the maddening barriers we erect—conceptual, psychological, and political—that facilitate this cruelty. What unifies the diverse topics Jonathan has written about is his desire to help dismantle these barriers. I have come to see the depth of Jonathan’s commitment to this goal, and I am moved with admiration.
I recently viewed a DVD of Jonathan conducting a seminar at King’s College. There was his precise but considerate way of replying to criticism, the smile that comes as much from his eyes as his mouth, the exuberant laugh, the seriousness, the gentle humanity. I realized that my sense of what it is to be a teacher and a philosopher is bound up with my physical impressions of Jonathan from the time he and I first talked philosophynearly 40 years ago. I don’t think either of us could have predicted that those conversations would be the prelude to hundreds of further conversations, and a lifelong friendship that has encompassed our two families.