David Heyd remembers Joseph Raz

I guess that some of you (or maybe even most of you) share my experience of never having received a direct verbal compliment from Joseph, such as "this is a terrific article", or "what a splendid argument". But he had his own indirect, usually non-verbal way of conveying to you some measure of appreciation. Yet we had to learn to interpret these non-verbal ways and by that avoid being offended.

In the competition who knew Joseph first, I am in a good position (although Peter Hacker and Avishai Margalit and maybe a few others can boast to have preceded me). I was his first teaching assistant in the department of philosophy at the Hebrew University when in 1968 he returned from Oxford with his fresh DPhil.

When I brought him the first batch of over 100 essays of his students in the Introduction to Ethics, after days and nights of work of filling the pages with comments in red ink, he browsed through them, invited me to coffee and cake, but said nothing about his impression of my TA work. I was a bit disappointed and went home feeling that I did not live up to his expectations.

But a few days later I got a message from the chair of the department telling me that Joseph approached him with a demand to raise my salary by 50% due to my diligent work.

Throughout the remaining 54 years of our relationship I had to rely on my power of interpretation of such indirect signs. And as many of you have probably experienced, there was no way to ask Joseph directly whether our interpretation of these signs was correct, as we thought. Rather than give us a yes-or-no answer Joseph would probably produce all the reasons for doubting our epistemic confidence. But in devoting much of his precious time to teach us skepticism he would demonstrate that after all we were correct!

Professor David Heyd, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem