David Charles

Howard H. Newman Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Classics 

David Charles, M.A., B.Phil., D.Phil, Oxford, faculty member at Yale since 2014: A scholar of Aristotle of immense international distinction, since your arrival you have been a pillar of the Department of Philosophy and the Ancient Philosophy community at Yale. Your seminars are legendary, often continued over tea at a nearby café. On perennially vital topics such as action, emotion, desire, happiness, and tragedy, you have helped students to see questions and themes explored by ancient and modern authors, to interrogate contemporary psychological writings alongside ancient philosophical works, and to challenge the unexamined presuppositions that shape the questions we frame and the answers we consider. You have been a much sought-after doctoral adviser, and a long line of Yale students has now had the benefit of the wise and generous mentorship for which you are known throughout the field. 

An author of many distinguished books and articles, you completed your landmark book, The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body’ Problem, during your time at Yale. It is at once an elegant distillation of your novel “third way” reading of Aristotelian hylomorphism and a powerful defense of how well this Aristotelian framework stands up to contemporary views shaped in response to Descartes’ problem. Your edited volume, The History of Hylomorphism: From Aristotle to Descartes, arose from one of the many highly successful conferences you coordinated at Yale. Always eager to bring together scholars with different viewpoints, you provided a a model of collaboration between scholars with expertise on different time periods in your book; it provides a more complete history. 

A proud son of Wales, your moving rendition of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” left an indelible impression on those at a conference for your retirement. As you “retire from retiring”—but not, we are sure, from collaborating and writing—your admiring colleagues in the Yale faculty thank you for your scholarly distinction and your many contributions to the field of philosophy and its study at Yale.