Benson Mates 1919–2009

The Journal of the History of Philosophy is saddened to report the death, on May 13, 2009, of Benson Mates. Professor Mates served the Journal of the History of Philosophy for many years while it was getting started at the University of California. He was the Associate Editor from the Journal’s inception in 1963 until 1974. He was also a founding member of the JHP Board of Directors and served as its Chair from 1979 to 1981.

Professor Mates was born May 19, 1919, in Portland, Oregon. He studied at the University of Oregon, completing the B.A. degree there in 1940 (in Philosophy and Mathematics). He began work at the graduate level in Philosophy at Cornell University, but his studies there were interrupted by his service in the U.S. Navy in World War II. In 1945, he entered the graduate program in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, completing his Ph.D. degree in 1948, after working with (among others) Harold Cherniss and Alfred Tarski. His dissertation was a study of “The Logic of the Old Stoa.” Professor Mates was hired by the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley in 1948 and was promoted to full Professor in 1958. He held that title until his retirement in 1989.

Professor Mates’s interests ranged widely over problems in logic, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. His influential books include Stoic Logic (1953), Elementary Logic (1965), and The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language (1986). His own philosophical tendencies were sympathetic to strands in ancient skepticism, a theme that emerges clearly in his book Skeptical Essays (1981).