Patrick Joseph Hill (1939–2008)

Patrick Joseph Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 26 March 1939. He received his undergraduate education at Fordham College, St. Peter’s College (Baltimore), and finally his AB degree in philosophy from Queens College/ CUNY in 1963. His graduate study in philosophy was at Washington University (St. Louis) and Boston University, where he earned his MA in 1966 and his PhD in 1969. He taught philosophy, broadly conceived, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1968–1983) and at Evergreen State College (1983–2008) for over forty years, accepting emeritus status at the latter institution shortly before his death on 26 June 2008.

While at Stony Brook, Pat founded the program entitled Federated Learning Communities (FLC), which has blossomed in various versions across the country. The goal of the FLC was to address a series of problems that were endemic in American higher education: mismatched expectations of students and faculty about the purpose of higher education; inadequate intellectual interaction on campus; incoherent undergraduate curricula; the inability of our refined disciplinary tools to engage with the complexity of our social problems; and the endless pressures on colleges and universities to “do more with less.” As these problems further encroach on our academic lives, the suggestions that he developed for addressing them only grow in value.

Pat was one of the few philosophers who focused on improving higher education in America. His means was not writing better books or developing a persona to be emulated by his followers, but rather living the ideal of community. The roots of this quest can be found in his 1969 dissertation, “The Structure of Agreement and Disagreement: A Dialogical Study of the Uses of Philosophical Reason.” Let me quote a bit from this extraordinary work:

When two philosophers argue and one convinces the other to adopt position b and abandon position a, it is prima facie reasonable to suppose that the argument in question is the sufficient cause of the change of position. A measure of doubt arises, however, when the same argument fails to bring about the same effect in a third philosopher; and that doubt may increase . . . when most prolonged and most intelligent attempts to produce the agreement . . . end in repeated failures. . . . The puzzlement concerning this phenomenon of persistent disagreement leads to many questions, one of which concerns the instances of agreement. While philosophers are far from silent on the subject of why other philosophers do not (or will not) agree with them, these explanations are more than a little inadequate, because—generally speaking—they are functions of unshared philosophical positions. . . . What is needed is a more general understanding of agreement and disagreement, a more fundamental one which is not a function of a particular philosophical position.

(x–xi)

Here is a lowly graduate student fearlessly addressing one of the thorniest issues in the history of philosophy. Further, he is telling us that, on the one hand, our comfortable answer—that philosophical disagreement results because others fail to recognize that we are correct—is mistaken, and that, on the other, the only way off this treadmill is cooperative inquiry. What we need is philosophical community, on a much higher level than I have ever experienced, but not so high that it should not be pursued.

It was during his years at Stony Brook that I studied with Pat—working especially on Royce and Dewey, and the large issue of community. He also stepped in at the last minute to shepherd me through my doctoral defense when one of my committee members had taken a job elsewhere, another had suffered a stroke, and a third was dying of not-yet-recognized Lyme disease. (Pat had earlier declined to serve on my committee because of the crunch of his administrative duties.) I can still feel the calming effect of knowing that Pat would take over this potential train wreck and that his spirit of cooperative inquiry would pervade the event—as it did.

Because of a chronic illness, Pat did not attend many conferences. He did, however, speak at our 11th annual meeting in Seattle in 1984. On that occasion, the...