The sudden death of Professor David Charles was announced last week. It came as a shock to so many: to the philosophical community at large, to ancient philosophers in particular, to colleagues at Oxford, where he spent most of his career, and at Yale, where he taught for a decade from 2014 to 2023, and to friends and collaborators around the world.
To say that David was a philosopher’s philosopher would be an understatement. Although his research and intellectual engagement centred on Aristotle, there was nothing philosophical that did not catch his interest and to which he did not contribute with a remarkable insight, acuity and generosity. His major publications include Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (1984), Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (2000), and The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the Mind/Body Problem (2021). At the time of his death, David and co-author Michail Peramatzis were in the midst of completing Aristotle's Metaphysics: The Philosophical Project of the Central Books. Much of David’s research came in the form of powerfully argued articles, some fifty plus over the decades, on topics as varied as definition and essence, hylomorphism, agency, desire, akrasia, processes, teleology, practical truth, eudaimonia, and emotion. David’s philosophical drive and collaborative instincts led to the editing of a series of influential collections: Explanation, Reduction and Realism (1992), Definition in Greek Philosophy (2009) and The History of Hylomorphism (2023). The reach and depth of his scholarship are reflected in the festschrift published in 2024, Aristotelian Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of David Charles.
But to focus exclusively on his published work would be to miss his enormous contribution to the practice of philosophy. His teaching, his conversations with colleagues, his legendary reading groups, his generous assistance to colleagues and students, constituted a professional life whose shape and energy flowed from a powerful sense of mission. As colleagues with the joyful experience of co-teaching with David at all levels, from first-year seminars on ‘great books’ to graduate courses devoted to close readings of some of the most difficult texts in Greek philosophy, we benefited enormously from his good will, his enthusiasm, his acuity, and his brilliant intellectual imagination. He had a gift for finding the best in every contribution and working to help students and colleagues develop their points in their strongest form, even—indeed especially—when they were in the service of positions to which he did not himself incline. He was even more generous with the many, many graduate students to whom he remained loyal long after they were launched on their own careers. Nor was his mission limited to the more narrowly academic part of the philosopher’s job. A departmental colleague reflected on “his continual efforts to make the academy and the world a place with more curiosity and less cruelty”, and this is a legacy that is arguably of equal value.
David Owain Maurice Charles (1947–2026) was a proud son of Wales, a loyal and loving family man, and an inspiration to all who knew him or his work. The loss to all is enormous.