(1920-2002)

Peter Heath, who was a former president and nearly a founding member of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America as well as a very good friend to many Carrollians in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, died in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Aug. 4, 2002.

Born in Milan, Italy, Peter attended Shrewsbury School, one of the most academically rigorous of the British public schools, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in Modern Greats. He served with the Royal Armoured Corps during the Second World War and at the end of the war helped interrogate senior German officers, including Admiral Karl Dönitz and Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel.

In 1995 he became Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Virginia after having taught at Mr. Jefferson's university for 33 years. He had served as chairman of the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia and as president of the Virginia Philosophical Association. According to the notice in the Charlottesville Daily Progress for Aug. 13, 2002, Peter "taught close to 10,000 undergraduates during his career at the University of Virginia, with his Introduction to Philosophy and Basic Logic classes, leading generations of students into the study of philosophy. His previous academic appointments had been at the University of Edinburgh and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland."

When Dr. Sandor Burstein and his son Mark were planning to establish a West Coast branch of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, Peter, who was then president of the national society but never jealous of its prerogatives, wrote Dr. Burstein a most encouraging letter congratulating the father and son on their new Carroll venture in Outland of California and recognized Mark as the Warden of Outland.

Like F.C.S. Schiller, the British pragmatist and author of the Mind! parodic commentary on The Hunting of the Snark, Peter had a roguish sense of humor which is perhaps best exhibited in his brilliant article on "Nothing" in The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. There is nothing like reading bits of it at a cocktail party when the conversation begins to flag. Of course, he also wrote the article on Lewis Carroll for that encyclopedia too.

Although he was trained at Oxford during the heyday of the analytic philosophy of language school, he was never one of those tiresome Wittgenstein clones, even if one of his favorite phrases went something like this: "The paradox we seem to be facing simply wants some sorting out of its elements in order to be resolved." In one of his first philosophical articles, "The Limits of Science" (Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 8, 1952) Peter translated Ugo Spiritus's arguments for the place of metaphysics in the modern world. He also wrote important articles on Hume, Reid, Ryle, and Scheler. He translated numerous classics of German philosophy, including works by Kant, Schelling, and Max Scheler's book The Nature of Sympathy; he edited Augustus De Morgan's logical works, etc.; but it is for his Carrollian writings that Peter is remembered by most of us. His The Philosopher's Alice, subtitled The Thinking Man's Guide to a Misunderstood Nursery Classic, which was first published in 1974 (reprinted in 1983), received enthusiastic reviews from Carroll scholars and philosophers. He distinguished between "nonsense" and "absurdity, " putting Edward Lear in the former category and Carroll solidly in the latter. Likewise in his Jabberwocky (vol. 13, no. 3) article on Carroll parodies he offers a clear distinction between "parody" and "burlesque." Peter wrote wonderful reviews of the important works of Carroll scholarship of the past decades. To cite just two examples see his "Carroll Through the Pillar-Box" (Virginia Quarterly, Summer 1980) on Morton Cohen's edition of the letters of Lewis Carroll and "The Carrollian Paper Chase" (English Language Notes, Dec. 1982) which was also published in Soaring with the Dodo.

Noted as a superb raconteur, he gave many talks, with his distinctively animated style of delivery, to the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, such as his memorable lecture delivered in Baltimore in 1990 on the nagging problem of the paternity of the pig baby in Wonderland and the gender of the animals in Wonderland (it seems Carroll was not completely consistent in his ascription of gender) and this was before gender studies became the darling child of academic critics.

In one of his most recent publications, the entry on "Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge" for the Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: 2000), Peter says this about the two Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark: "Together with portions of his two-volume fairy-novel Sylvie and Bruno they were the only writings ostensibly for children to have attracted or deserved the notice of philosophers." We are most grateful Peter Lauchlan Heath was one of those philosophers.

August A. Imholtz, Jr.

August 23, 2002