My teacher and dissertation advisor died on November 10.
Dr. D, as I called him, was a scholar and a gentleman. He earned his PhD from Yale after writing a dissertation on Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Wittgenstein, published as Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy by The University of Chicago Press in 1981. Later he wrote David Hume and the Problem of Reason, from Yale University Press, and a book published by ISI called The Roots of Freedom, based on lectures he gave for Radio Free America. After starting his career at the University of Chicago, Dr. D moved to the University of Houston and then to Loyola University Chicago in 1993, just as I was enrolling there in graduate school.
The unifying theme of Dr. D’s most philosophic scholarship was a recovery of common sense under modern conditions. By common sense, he meant a confrontation with reality without using the powerful lens of modern natural science. Hume, he argued, understood the place and utility of modern science in harnessing the powers of nature. But Hume never confused scientific knowledge with genuine wisdom about how the world worked. The scientific method ignored and presumed controversial answers to deeper questions about how nature worked—how matter cohered, how one thing caused another, how things have a stable identity. So Hume’s work testified to how science was different from philosophy—no matter how much modern thinkers sought to elide the two.
Dr. D’s commitment to the principles of a free society, born of the Scottish Enlightenment, was at its deepest level a commitment to old America—an America where free people governed themselves and aspired to virtue. Trained as an East Coast Straussian, the effectual truth of his scholarship was always more West Coast.
His insights first shaped what I was interested in and then shaped how I grew as a scholar. But his influence on my academic career was nothing compared to his influence on my life.
My wife Amy and I were just married when I entered graduate school. Dr. and Mrs. D (Karen) invited us to dinner more than once during our first year at school. They had a classic home in a Frank Lloyd Wright neighborhood in Riverside, Illinois, stocked with books and elegant furniture. They served beautiful, delicious dinners. We talked—actually, Karen talked—for hours as Amy and I had good wine for the first time in our lives (a $20 bottle in 1994!). The Danfords recommended that Amy and I have children early and often, as part of their liberal and authoritative dispensing of advice. We were inclined to listen. Jackson, our oldest, arrived in 1995, and Travis in 1997, when I was 26. “Good start,” was Dr. D’s reaction.
Dr. D and Mrs. D continued to invite us to dinners and encouraged us to bring the babies along thereafter. “Don’t be a seatbelt Nazi,” he would say when we packed up the kids to leave. Amy would cradle the baby in her arms, as we defied the law as much as society’s expectations.
We admired the fruits of the Danfords’ efforts in raising their children. Amy and I could see the deep emotional attachment Dr. D and Mrs. D had to America, and to the greatness of our civilization, in their relationship. They sang in a choir and toured Europe. They could talk intelligently about pipe organs and Russian literature. They would get misty after a few drinks as they listened to classic country and classic Bach. Their three children are successful, and Dr. D had 12 grandchildren when he died.
Amy and I both came from wonderful, intact families. Still, we were captivated by the Danfords’ close-knit family, and we have sought to imitate (and even exceed!) the Danfords in ours.
Amy and I patched together a parenting plan in graduate school. She worked mornings, while I wore out the children. I studied after she came home, and she napped while the tuckered-out children slept. But Mrs. D harped on me to finish grad school and get a real job: “Your boys don’t need to be raised by Mr. Mom!”
As I was writing my dissertation on Hume, Mrs. D introduced me to anti-feminist literature early and often, especially Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism. Dr. D got me invited to a series of Liberty Fund events on the family in the late 1990s while I was still a graduate student. A lifelong interest in the family was born of practical necessity and intellectual challenge.
Dr. D was an old-school legend. When he experienced chest pains once, he put on his running shoes and ran a few miles to the hospital, where he had open-heart surgery to repair clogged arteries later in the day. Once he complained to me about jet lag: “Every time I come back from Paris…” Cry me a river! He retired to his parents’ home on a lake in Kansasville, Wisconsin, where he enjoyed boating and seeing his children and grandchildren, as well as old friends.
The measure of a man lies in what he loves and serves. Dr. D served the cause of knowledge. He loved liberty. He believed in educating people in what he called “pretty good books,” in part because almost all pretty good books are inherently right-wing. He showed many students how to grow and govern a family toward virtue.
Hume died unmarried and without faith, almost celebrating his atheism. Dr. D passed away like a portrait of old America, surrounded by family, and was then received into the loving arms of Jesus. God bless him and his family.
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