Richard S. Robin (1926–2010)

Richard Shale Robin, long-term editor of the Transactions and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Mount Holyoke College, passed away on 4 October 2010. Dick Robin was born on 18 April 1926 in Stamford, Connecticut. In 1944 he entered Harvard University with the aim of studying medicine. He started off as a mathematics major, but after taking an ethics course with Ralph Barton Perry he switched to philosophy. Robin wrote an honors thesis on Chauncey Wright under Donald C. Williams, who had earlier been assigned to him as a tutor. While doing research on Wright, Robin got interested in Peirce. Some years later this interest developed into his doctoral dissertation. Robin began to work on his dissertation, entitled Critical Common-Sensism: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce, under C.I. Lewis, but as Lewis retired before Robin could complete the dissertation, and left for Princeton, Williams took over. Unfortunately, Williams was neither interested nor well versed in American philosophy, which made this arrangement far less than optimal. While he was at Harvard, Robin also took courses with W.V.O. Quine and a seminar with Sir Karl Popper. He took his Ph.D. in 1958.

After his graduation Robin accepted a position at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut, where he met Edward Madden. While at Storrs he also met and married Joann Cohan, an accomplished concert pianist and a pioneer in the field of music therapy. (Her work with a patient with Williams syndrome is discussed by Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia.) The Robins had two children, David, who became a physicist and Debra who became a social worker. In 1962 Robin became Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College, where he would remain for the rest of his career. He received tenure in the 1964–65 academic year, was promoted to Associate Professor a year later, and served as Chair of the Philosophy Department from 1968 till 1982. Also in 1962 Robin and Madden met with Edward C. Moore. This meeting, which took place in Moore’s home, proved extremely fruitful. Not only did it mark the birth of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, but it also spawned an anthology of papers on Peirce to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Peirce’s death. The anthology, which they saw as a sequel to an earlier volume edited by Wiener and Young, was entitled Studies in the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: Second Series (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964). Robin co-edited the volume with Moore.

The first issue of the Transactions came out in the spring of in 1965 under the editorship of Edward Moore. For the period between 1966 and 1968 Robin joined Moore as Associate Editor. Moore resigned at the end of the 1960s and Edward Madden took over the editorship. Madden resigned in 1971, at which point Robin became the journal’s sole editor. In 1974 he was joined by Peter Hare, and till his appointment as Editor Emeritus in 2001, Robin co-edited the journal with Hare, taking prime responsibility for the Peirce submissions. Hence, for well over three decades Dick Robin played a central role in Peirce scholarship, which is also a time during which the Transactions developed itself into a highly regarded philosophical journal. To commemorate Robin’s long service to the journal, the first issue of 2002, a double issue, was dedicated to him. The issue contains a brief biographical essay on him as well.

Robin is most well known in the Peirce world, however, for his monumental Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967). This annotated catalogue is an absolutely indispensable guide to the enormous mass of Peirce manuscripts that is kept at Harvard. Robin began working on the catalogue during a sabbatical while he was still at the University of Connecticut. His initial plan for the sabbatical had been to pick up the theme of his dissertation and study the Peirce manuscripts some more. However, upon arriving at Harvard Robin met Max Fisch who had just begun his work on an intellectual biography of Peirce...