Professor Peter Heath

Born: 9 May, 1922, in Milan

Died: 4 August, 2002, in Edinburgh, aged 80

MANY friends, old pupils and old colleagues in both Britain and America will have marked with sorrow the death of Peter Heath, a distinguished teacher of and writer on philosophy, a leading exponent of the works of Lewis Carroll, and an urbane and entertaining conversationalist.

Peter Lauchlan Heath and his twin brother John, his only survivor, were born in Milan, where their father was working as an insurance broker for a British firm. When they were four, the family returned to Britain. Peter was educated at Shrewsbury School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Modern Greats (Philosophy, Politics and Economics).

His studies were interrupted after two years in 1942, when he enlisted in the Inns of Court Regiment. In 1944 and 1945 he participated as an intelligence officer in the 11th Armoured Division, in the advance of the British forces through Normandy, Belgium, Holland and Westphalia. Being proficient in German, he interpreted for the divisional commander, General Roberts, when at Flensburg he accepted the surrender of a remnant of the enemy’s armed forces, represented by Admiral Doenitz and Field Marshal Keitel, who were holding out in Schleswig, along with several members of the fallen Nazi government.

Returning to Oxford, he completed his studies and obtained a first-class degree. In 1946, he was appointed to a lectureship in Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, which he held for 12 years. He then went as a senior lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics to the University of St Andrews, and from there in 1962 to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, as Professor of Philosophy. Retiring in 1995, he nevertheless continued to teach as Professor Emeritus. No fewer than 10,000 students passed through his hands at Charlottesville. His pupils at all three universities will remember him for his lucidity of exposition and his helpful guidance as a tutor.

During his undergraduate days at Oxford, he experienced the teaching of, among others, HH Price, Gilbert Ryle, AJ Ayer and JL Austin. Ayer’s doctrine of "logical positivism" was then rather popular. It laid it down that the only meaningful statements are those verifiable in sense-experience, thus throwing morals and metaphysics out of the window, which is what AD Lindsay, Master of Balliol, is said to have literally done with Ayer’s book, Language, Truth and Logic (1934).

Peter Heath, too, would have none of this. One of his first articles was entitled "The Limits of Science", and the breadth of his approach to philosophy can be seen in most of his published writings.

His main contribution was as a scholar of Kant and post-Kantian German philosophers. He translated Kant’s Lectures on Ethics (now published in the Cambridge series) and many other works by German philosophers, including Fichte, Schelling, Schlick and Humboldt. He himself wrote on the English empiricists (Hume, Reid), and, reaching further afield and further back, on Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037), the great Iranian polymath. He contributed frequently to the leading philosophical journals, such as Mind, Inquiry, Philosophy, etc.

On a more light-hearted level, he contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy the brilliant and learned article on "Nothing": "an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept. ... Nobody seems to know how to deal with it" (he would, of course) - with a bibliography, nevertheless, listing 18 items; and to a Festschrift (Vindex Humanitatis, Armidale, 1980) in honour of a colleague, a professor of Classics, the entertaining piece entitled "How many angels can dance on the end of a pin?"

As a philosopher, Heath found a special pleasure in reading and interpreting the works of Lewis Carroll. The two Alice stories, in his view, "are works of unsleeping rationality, whose frolics are governed by close attention to logical principles". In justification of this belief, he wrote what is probably his most popular work, The Philosopher’s Alice (1974), in which the left-hand pages reproduce Carroll’s text, with Tenniel’s drawings, facing Heath’s philosophical comments.

He was, of course, a member of the Lewis Carroll Societies both in Britain and North America, and for a time president of the latter. He gave many talks to both, including one on the gender of the pig-baby in Alice in Wonderland. He also wrote the article on Carroll for the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

While at Charlottesville, Heath made a regular practice of spending some weeks in Britain in the summer; he kept an apartment in Buckingham Terrace, Edinburgh, for this purpose. During these visits, he was a welcome and rewarding guest at the tables of many Edinburgh households, and enlivened the occasion with his conversation, whether discussing current issues or philosophical problems, or telling stories of his experiences. He also played the occasional round of golf with old fellow-golfers.

During his last such visit, he displayed no obvious signs of physical decay, though he confessed to shortness of breath when walking uphill, and to having recently given up pipe-smoking - effortlessly, he said; and his conversation was as crisp and lively as ever. But, after a luncheon party in the Dean Valley on 4 August, he collapsed walking on his way home, and died shortly afterwards. On his behalf, we can be grateful that he had what Caesar judged the best death, "a sudden one".

His funeral took place on 15 August in Warriston Crematorium. It included a recital of part of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee chapter from The Philosopher’s Alice (the text interspersed with the commentary). A memorial service has also been held at Charlottesville.