John Woods (1937-2024)
John Woods, a philosopher well-known for his work in logic, and who held faculty and administrative positions at several Canadian universities, has died.
Professor Woods authored or co-authored nearly twenty books (not counting a few textbooks and many edited collections), including works such as Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic (2018), Errors of Reasoning: Naturalizing the Logic of Inference (2013), The Death of Argument: Fallacies in Agent-Based Reasoning (2004), and Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences (2003), among others. His work is also the subject of two festschrifts: Mistakes of Reason: Essays in Honour of John Woods (2005) and Natural Arguments: a Tribute to John Woods (2016). You can learn more about Wood’s works here and here.
At the time of his death, Woods was Honorary Professor of Logic at the University of British Columbia and Director of its Abductive Systems Group, President Emeritus and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge, and the Charles S. Peirce Professor Emeritus of Logic in the Department of Computer Science at King’s College London. He held positions previously at the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria, and the University of Calgary, and had visiting appointments at many institutions.
He died on August 15th, 2024.
(via Dominic McIver Lopes)
I’ll repost this note from Leiter’s blog:
I’m terribly sorry to read this. John was generous with his time and always happy to talk about fiction and the philosophy of literature. He was very encouraging and a tremendous help to me with some of my own work on the subject, despite our having some very fundamental disagreements.
I will just take this opportunity to note that, although philosophers of literature often credit Lewis with first offering a semantics of fiction (in Truth in Fiction, 1978), John is actually responsible for what is, to my knowledge, the very first published attempt at doing so: The Logic of Fiction: A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic (Mouton, 1974). It’s an incredibly rich and interesting piece of work, although he later came to think his entire enterprise was mistaken (see Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic, Springer 2018).
Oops. Although _The Logic of Fiction_ was the first book on the semantics of fiction, Mohan Matthen correctly notes that it was prefigured by John’s 1969 paper “Functionality and the Logic of Relations.”
I’ve never posted on this site before but I will for the sake of my former teacher. I was once an undergrad student in four of John’s courses @ University of British Columbia: Non-Classical Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and a directed reading on logic. To say that he was a great teacher and thinker, who patiently responded to nearly all student e-mails no matter how asinine or illogical, would be an understatement: the man was always willing to talk about any topic in philosophy, literature, science, or politics etc. He was honest, constructively critical, and always willing to talk, an experience pretty much every student I knew also had. Strongly recommend checking out his underrated book ‘Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences’. May he rest in peace.
John Woods was one of the greatest mentors I’ve ever had, and he was the professor I was most indebted to as an undergrad at UBC. His classes in modal and non-classical logic were a tour de force. He was incredibly charismatic, and his panoramic view on the philosophy of logic was inspiring. His undergrad class probably had the highest density of academic philosophers to come out in my year. He truly was a world-class philosopher and teacher. Perhaps the greatest lesson he hammered home to me and his logic students was to never be beguiled by a formal system’s “technical virtuosity” and forget to be critical of its “conceptual adequacy”. Alas, this is advice that is easier to remember than to abide by.
Up until the year of his passing, I would often send him an email wishing him a Merry Christmas or to update him on what’s going on in my life while asking about how he was doing. His keen interest in his students continued long after they had graduated from his class. Even in his emails, he wrote with the same poetic erudition that was typical of the way he wrote his philosophy papers. He had a great mind and a warm heart. I miss him already.
Also reposted from Leiter Reports:
John Woods was a friend whose passing I mourn deeply. He was a fixture in Canadian academic life for a very long time. He got his PhD from Michigan and took a position at the University of Toronto in 1962 at the age of 25. There, he was appreciated as an original mind who embarked on many original lines of philosophical investigation, primarily in philosophical logic and metaphysics. As Michel-Antoine notes above, he was the first to investigate the semantics of fiction–but this wasn’t in 1974 as M-A says, but actually in 1969, when (in a paper published in the Southern Journal) he wrote “It is true, is it not, that Sherlock Holmes lived in Baker Street, and false or anyhow not true that he lived in Bleeker Street?” and ends with the rather oracular observation that while ‘exists’ “may not be much of a predicate” it can nonetheless add something. That conclusion may be unremarkable today, but it was John who put it into our store of truisms.
John’s real interest, though, was in academic institutions and in the people, younger people in particular, who lived in them. He left Toronto to take up the position of Chair in Victoria and then moved to Calgary, where he was the first Dean of Humanities. It was there that I first met him when I took up the position of Sessional Lecturer in 1976. John helped me out in many many ways back then–authorizing my first academic trip to give a paper (sessionals didn’t have travel funds) and, as editor of Dialogue, publishing my first paper, and in general being nice to me albeit very de haut en bas from the lofty heights of the Dean to the basement living very humble temporary hire.
John went from there to assume the Presidency of the University of Lethbridge. There, somewhat sadly, he encountered strong resistance that brought his administrative trajectory to an end. He had a vision of Lethbridge as a university of fine arts–an ambitious collection of paintings, a plan to establish an opera school, stuff like that. But the faculty did not approve, and a motion of non-confidence was passed. John resigned and never occupied an administrative position of importance again. He continued in the Philosophy Department at Lethbridge until he retired. Probably not the culmination he envisaged back when Toronto hired him in 1962. Toronto-Victoria-Calgary-Lethbridge . . . not the path of a shooting star.
I intersected with John again when he retired to Vancouver and took up teaching at the University of British Columbia where I was Head of the Philosophy Department at the time. I realized immediately that he was a tremendous asset as a teacher and I was able to install him as a more or less permanent lecturer in the Department. (He taught at UBC until quite recently and was beloved by the undergraduates there.) At that point, our relationship became much more intimate and, of course, much more equal than it had been in Calgary. By that time, he was (among other things) past President of the Royal Society of Canada and he would impart a great deal of wisdom about academic institutions in Canada and elsewhere. I don’t think I have ever had that kind of friend in academia before or after — a kind of wise and kindly uncle who was fun to be with, and always a source of sage advice, academic insight, and morale boosts.
As Michel-Antoine’s note attests, he was that way to a lot of people who were younger than him, but not always young. (I was in my fifties when we became friends in Vancouver, and he took care of my education then as he did with many who were in their twenties.) There are many distinguished academics who owe a lot to his guidance — Tim Schroeder and Cheryl Misak come to mind immediately as people who studied with him in Lethbridge.
I’ll always miss John. He was a true academic and a true philosopher. He was always generous and compassionate. He touched the lives of a good many younger people. A great Canadian.
Thanks for writing all this Mohan. I just want to add a little of my own. John Woods was my mentor when I was an undergraduate (in the strong sense that I was his protege, I suppose) and he was absolutely fantastic in the role. He was charming, smart, and egoless as a teacher. As his RA I was allowed to read a book he was working on in manuscript and both conduct research for it and also attack its arguments as vigorously as I knew how, and it was through that process that I went from being a very good philosophy student to a very bad – but now developing – philosopher. I can hardly measure my debt to him.
In my encomium, I wrote: “Probably not the culmination he envisaged back when Toronto hired him in 1962. Toronto-Victoria-Calgary-Lethbridge . . . not the path of a shooting star.” I shouldn’t have ended that paragraph there.
I should have added:
On the other hand, you could think of it this way: Professor of Philosophy, Department Chair, Dean, President. That *is* the trajectory of a shooting star. Still, I am not sure he meant to end his career with twenty or so years back at the starting point: Professor of Philosophy. However that might have been, he was comfortable, distinguished, and very much respected in that role. And as attested above, he was revered by his student.
He contributed significantly to philosophy throughout his life, being a mainstay of the informal logic world, often collaborating with Ralph Johnson and Tony Blair at the University of Windsor, and his colleague, Trudy Govier. He became (as Frank Hong hints) a sceptic about formal virtuosity. This turn to informal logic was, no doubt, the reason he later disavowed his early 70s views on the formal semantics of fiction.