Bill Ruddick

I will be coming to the memorial along with Aryeh Kosman.  We were all graduate students together at Harvard, along with my late wife, Sara Ruddick.  Sally and I kept in touch with Barry over the years, and I more frequently since my son now lives in Berkeley.  I spent a splendid afternoon with him and his daughters a month or so before he died, talking about graduate school days and his attractions to philosophical analysis ("a way of discovering how things work"). He was, in the fullest, most laudatory sense, the most "companionable" philosopher I have known.

Barry and I met in graduate school in a course in which he was enrolled and I was the teaching assistant.  Our first philosophical bond was memorably a mutual disregard for the teacher. But happily we soon found other topics of mutual interest, as we did whenever we met over the years in Canada, New York, Oxford, and Berkeley, including our last afternoon a few weeks before he died.  I came to regard Barry as a paragon of the three "philosophical" virtues: Clarity, Depth, and Charity. By "Charity", I mean attentive, patient, generous companionability which makes philosophical discussion a boon. Whether "Charity" is "the greatest" of these three, it is the one I will miss most with his loss, along with his endearing wry smile and chuckle.