ABSTRACT

Dallas Willard died on May 8, 2013, at the age of 77. Born in rural southern Missouri on September 4, 1935, Willard received his Bachelor’s Degree from Baylor University in 1957. In 1964, Willard received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It was William Hay, Willard’s thesis advisor, who introduced Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen to Willard. Hay himself had learned of Husserl’s work through Gustav Bergmann. Willard taught at the University of Southern California from 1965 until 2012. He won numerous teaching awards and directed 31 dissertations during his time there. Willard is best known in the philosophical community for his extensive contributions

to phenomenological philosophy and scholarship. Willard is responsible for translating two major volumes of Husserl’s early philosophical work: Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts,1 and Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics,2 which contains Husserl’s philosophical works published between the Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891) and the Logische Untersuchungen (1900-01). Willard authored lengthy introductions to both volumes. Willard also translated Adolf Reinach’s essay “Concerning Phenomenology.” Willard authored over fifty articles on a wide variety of topics within epistemology, the

philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy. His book Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge was published in 1984. In it, Willard explains in great detail how Husserl’s conception of phenomenology grew out of his early work in the philosophy of arithmetic, logic, and epistemology. Willard had been working on another book, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, during the last several years of his life. Willard argues that our culture and its leading institutions have lost a commitment to the possibility of acquiring genuine moral knowledge, that is, testable and appropriately acquired true beliefs concerning good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. Willard attempts to explain the philosophical and historical forces at play in this disappearance, and to offer solutions. Several of Willard’s former students are presently working to complete the manuscript on the basis of Willard’s notes and drafts. Willard wrote and taught on a wide variety of philosophical subjects. He studied both

historical and contemporary philosophical figures, and had a deep knowledge of and interest in the literature of both “analytic” and “continental” traditions. One of Willard’s deepest philosophical commitments, and one which he rightly recognized to be out of favor within the dominant currents of thought in both traditions for much of his lifetime, was epistemic realism, according to which “the objects of veridical thought and perception both exist and have the characteristics they are therein discovered to have without regard to whether or not they are in any way actually present to any mind of any type.”3

Much of his work bears directly on this topic.