Composed for Amherst College Memorial (V.09):

Prior to the beginning of the academic year in the Autumn of '56, at President Charles Cole's reception for incoming freshmen and new faculty members, I found myself standing next to a most distinguished-looking, pipe-smoking individual who introduced himself as WE Kennick of the Philosophy Department, newly arrived from teaching at Oberlin College. An indication of my own naiveté at that time was that, when he said that his special interest was aesthetics, I had no idea what the word meant—'tho I was of course too embarrassed to admit the fact. Across the next four years, and indeed ever since then (including my subsequent years of doctoral work in England and my own academic career back in the USA), I found both his sheer intellect and his eloquence in lecture to be incomparable. One anecdote from his marvelous History of Philosophy course: when someone asked for the fallacy in Berkeley's argument that ‘matter’ is a meaningless term, since one perceives only qualities and never—by definition—the substratum, he replied: ‘There's no fallacy; it's quite a valid argument’, which quite astonished us all. Later, while I was studying in London, he came there to live during a half-year sabbatical from Amherst, when I had a better opportunity to know both him and his charmingly brilliant wife Nancy (who had been one of his students at Oberlin). No one among the renowned scholars that I encountered among English academics was his equal in clarity of thought and expression. I've no doubt that, like myself, innumerable of his students and colleagues from across the years treasure most highly his example of intellectual excellence coupled with cultural sophistication. His article in the British philosophical journal Mind, ‘Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?’, remains a paradigm of clear and decisive philosophical thought, a supreme example of how one single work can outshine entire volumes by lesser minds. May he dialogue with the worthies in Paradise!