In Memoriam
William Tolhurst, 1947-2011

William ("Bill") Tolhurst, Associate Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Northern Illinois University, died on September 15, 2011, in DeKalb, Illinois. Bill was a nurturing teacher, an accomplished scholar, a dedicated member of the university community, and, above all else, a devoted husband and father. He is survived by his wife, Diane Tolhurst of DeKalb; his daughter, Abigail Christiansen of Lafayette, Indiana; and his son, Michael Tolhurst of DeKalb.

Bill was a Connecticut Yankee before his conversion to Midwesterner at the age of 30. He was born June 6, 1947, in West Hartford, Connecticut, and he attended the University of Connecticut, receiving a B.A. in English literature in 1969. To the great good fortune of his subsequent students and colleagues, late in his undergraduate education he discovered philosophy in an aesthetics class taught by Joel Kupperman. Like many of us before and since, Bill was instantly addicted, and decided to enter the graduate program in philosophy at UConn after graduation. He received his Ph.D. in 1976, with a dissertation "On the Relevance of the Author's Intention to the Interpretation of Literature."

After completing doctoral study, Bill taught for a year at UConn, then joined the faculty at Northern Illinois University as assistant professor in the fall of 1977, lured by a whopping salary of $12,600 a year (a fact he enjoyed reporting decades later). In his 33 years at NIU, Bill was the very definition of a difference maker. He served eight years as department chair, during which time, with unique administrative ingenuity, he mastered the art of "spending OPM" (other people's money), which was instrumental in building the flourishing graduate program the department now enjoys. While chair, Bill became a tireless and eloquent advocate for justice and commonsense in the college, and in the years after serving as chair provided the same leadership as a longtime member of the University Council. In collaboration with the College of Business, he launched the Certificate of Undergraduate Study in Applied Ethics. In every role he played within the university, he gave his all, and he became known by his colleagues throughout the university community as a first-class citizen.

Bill also had one of the sharpest and quickest philosophical minds I have ever encountered. Nowhere did this show itself more than in departmental colloquia. Speaker after speaker would deliver fifty minutes (or more) of complex and tortured philosophical argument, leaving most of the audience struggling to stay on the path to the promised enlightenment. When the torture finally ended, Bill's was often the first hand up. He always began, "Let me get this straight," then followed with a succinct and incisive summary of the speaker's view, which finally delivered enlightenment not only to the rest of the audience, but to the speaker. Bill would ask, "Is that right?" and the speaker would eagerly confirm the accuracy of the summary, filled with pride at having produced the brilliant ideas Bill had just so beautifully articulated. Bill would then say, "Okay," and follow it with a succinct and incisive statement of a crushing counterexample to the view, always offered in the spirit of collegial philosophical exploration. I remember this sequence of events so vividly because I lived through it during my own job talk at NIU; I then recognized its repetition many times in the years to follow, empathizing with each new victim.

Bill brought a boundless intellectual energy and boyish enthusiasm to all philosophical discussions. Here, too, there was a recognizable pattern. Not long into discussion, Bill's keen philosophical mind would become fully engaged, initiating an irrepressible, rapid-fire delivery of finely honed commentary. Through some mysterious positive feedback loop, he would wind himself up as he went, and as his excitement grew he would begin to bounce up and down from the knee. Invariably, the bouncing was accompanied by periodic bursts of Bill's giddy and infectious laugh, bubbling up from the pure joy of participation in philosophical conversation.

Many in the philosophical community beyond NIU had the pleasure of knowing Bill personally or through his work. Those who knew him personally undoubtedly recognize the superior intellect and joyful personality described above. Those who didn't know him personally nonetheless knew the philosopher who served as President of the Illinois Philosophical Association from 1993 to 1995, delivering the presidential address "Making Sense of Making Sense," or they knew the author of articles in aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. He is perhaps best known for his articles "On What a Text Is and How It Means" (British Journal of Aesthetics, 1979) and "The Argument from Moral Disagreement" (Ethics, 1987). But he is not sufficiently known for his article "Seemings" (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1998), an important reflection on the nature of cognitive states in which something seems to us to be true. In an article last year in Ratio, Andrew Cullison wrote, "The only philosopher I am aware of who has made some serious attempts to elucidate the nature of seeming states is William Tolhurst." Given the centrality of seemings to contemporary work in epistemology, the literature would benefit from greater attention to Bill's work on the topic.

In the few years before his death, Bill had been engaged in a heroic effort to write a book whose working title was Seeing What Matters: Moral Experience and Intuition, in which he planned to extend his work on seemings to moral epistemology. But work on the book was severely impeded after Bill was involved in a serious car accident in the fall of 2007. Following the accident, it was discovered that Bill was suffering frontal lobe atrophy, an untreatable condition of unassigned cause that produced tragic cognitive and perceptual deficits. He was never again the same old Bill, and his condition led to his early retirement in 2010. Bill was then diagnosed in late summer of this year with advanced esophageal cancer and given only a short time to live. Despite a rapid decline, and with his family at his side until the end, Bill met his fate with a grace and dignity expressive of his own unique brand of Taoist-inflected Catholicism. Those of us who knew Bill at his best knew him as one of the best, and it is Bill the Best who lives on in our hearts and minds.

David J. Buller