Kenneth Winkler

Kingman Brewster, Jr. Professor of Philosophy 

Ken Winkler, B.A. Trinity College, Hartford, Ph.D. the University of Texas-Austin, faculty member at Yale since 2007, after 17 years at Wellesley College: You are an exceptional scholar of early modern philosophy of international renown, and a central figure in the department of Philosophy. You have published impressively on a wide array of European philosophers. In this work, you grapple with such topics as sense perception, causation, classification, personal identity, and moral judgment. But you are likely best known for your work on Berkeley and Hume. 

Your major book, Berkeley: An Interpretation, which has garnered many plaudits from critics who have been struck by its “impressive, densely argued scholarship,” its “clear style and argumentation,” its “historically informed discussion,” and the “thorough knowledge and careful examination of text” which led one reader to suggest no critic could “provide a more coherent account.” Teaching has always been important to you, and it is little wonder that your recent fascination with American writers derives from a lecture course you stepped in to teach at Wellesley when a colleague retired. Your focus has been with the history of philosophical idealism in America from the middle of the 18th to the twentieth century, and on writers from Jonathan Edwards to Emerson (“very hard to contain,” you say), as well as Thoreau, Royce, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Boston personalists. Although these figures were not systematic philosophers in the traditional sense, they dealt with philosophical issues in ways that galvanized your scholarly and personal attention and became the core of the lectures you gave at Oxford in 2012 when you were Sir Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor in the History of Ideas. 

You began life after college as a journalist, and you felt the romance of the New York journalistic world. Perhaps your philosophical leanings - such as your “text dependent nature, your “skeptical disposition,” and the joy you experience in “finding and discovering” found useful development in the work of those years. You also say that talking and working with others gives you much pleasure – one reason, no doubt, why you are so good at teaching, speculating, and philosophizing with colleagues and students, and listening to all sides of a discussion, sometimes without reaching a conclusion, and why Directed Studies and seminars have been such a perfect fit for your nature. 

If pleasure is the accompaniment of unimpeded activity, as Aristotle has said, you seem to have found much pleasure in many aspects of life, not only in philosophizing and walking and thinking and finding and discovering, but also in birding, in playing the banjo, and in enjoying the natural world. Your colleagues and students thank you for sharing the joys that you experience in life, and they have full expectation that that joy will continue in your retirement.