Bob Binkley (1929 - 2012)

 

Robert Williams ("Bob") Binkley, who died on March 23rd, 2012, came to the Philosophy Department at Western in 1966, and retired in 1993. He was born in 1929 in Rome, to which his parents had travelled to attend the World Bibliographic Conference. He grew up in Cleveland and St Petersburg, Florida. After his father's death in 1940 his mother moved the family to Boulder, Colorado, where she became the Social Sciences librarian at the University of Colorado. He attended Swarthmore College, where he studied  chemistry for a couple of years, switching later to philosophy and finishing his BA at the University of Colorado. He married Paula Laird Schroeder and moved to Minneapolis where he did his graduate work with Wilfred Sellars at the University of Minnesota. After a year in Oxford on a Fulbright Fellowship, he completed his Ph.D. in 1958 with a dissertation entitled "Moral Reasoning". By then he was teaching at Duke, where he remained until moving to Western.

Bob served in many capacities in the Department and throughout the University, becoming Department Chair in 1971. He was admired by his colleagues for his probity and administrative talent. In the words of one of his contemporaries, "Bob Binkley brought to the Chair of the Department what above all  I would call 'integrity'. This means a bundle of personal attributes which, in my view, had too often been lacking : openness, a broad intelligence, a generous view of philosophical inquiry, balance, no favouritism, democratic decision-making, complete honesty". Bob will also be remembered for having said, in Senate, of the then current president of the University that he should be ashamed of himself for having proposed that the library system be sold to the private sector.

As a philosopher, Bob was noted for his work in modal logic, particularly for his widely referenced 1958 Journal of Philosophy paper "The Surprise Examination in Modal Logic".  At around the same time he developed an approach to the semantics of modal logic, "world theory", which reduced modal logic to quantification over possible worlds.

After Bob's retirement, my late wife Mimi (who was a close friend of Bob`s wife Paula ) and I spent many delightful evenings dining with the Binkleys at their home on Thornton Avenue. The meal was invariably delicious and the conversation - leavened by Bob`s whimsical sense of humour and Paula's trenchant observations - always animated.  

Bob will be greatly missed by everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him. He was, truly, a gentleman and a scholar.

                       -  John L. Bell

Western provides the best student experience among Canada's leading research-intensive universities.