Philosophy, History, and other Productively Useless Endeavors: Essays in Honor of David C. K. Curry
Preface
This book is a festschrift (a celebratory collection of writings) honoring Dr. David C. K. Curry, edited by his three children and presented to him upon his retirement in the summer of 2025. The festschrift includes autobiographical reflections from Dr. Curry’s students, colleagues, friends, and family; scholarly essays on evil, pedagogy, and the historiography of philosophy; a pastiche of Miguel de Cervantes; and several instances of what can only be described as “original multimedia content.
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David Cook Kemper Curry was born on December 1st, 1958, in Syracuse, NY, and raised in Vienna, VA. He graduated from James Madison High School in 1976, and then attended Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, initially studying biology before discovering his twin passions for history and philosophy. Upon graduating from Wofford in 1981, he was admitted to the University of Virginia to pursue his doctorate in philosophy.
At UVA, Curry studied with Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty, James Cargile, Daniel Devereux (his dissertation supervisor), and Jorge Secada (with whom he forged a close lifelong friendship). Curry’s Ph.D. dissertation, Flux and the Forms, offered a reading of Plato’s middle dialogues grounded in an acute sensitivity to the problems and assumptions that characterized the intellectual context that Plato inherited from Socrates and the pre-Socratics. While in graduate school, Curry worked countless shifts behind Charlottesville bars, including most notably the Boar’s Head Inn—where he met a waitress named Denise Roca—and the C&O Restaurant on the Downtown Mall. He married Denise in 1983; two sons, Galen and Devin, arrived while Curry was writing his dissertation. He earned his Ph.D. in 1990 and immediately took up a faculty position at the State University of New York College at Potsdam. His daughter, Tess, was born a couple of years after the family moved north.
Meanwhile, within a year of arriving at SUNY Potsdam in the Fall of 1990, Curry was named Chair of the Department of Philosophy—a position he held, off and on (but mostly on), for most of the subsequent three-and-a-half decades. He earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in 1996, and promotion to full Professor in 2013. He taught his last classes at SUNY Potsdam in the Spring semester of 2025. Over those 35 years, Curry published articles, reviews, and book chapters about ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, philosophical pedagogy, and the purpose of a liberal arts education (see selected bibliography, below), while drafting (and redrafting) a book manuscript meant to serve as a comprehensive introduction to (and reinterpretation of) Plato’s theory of forms. He was also deeply involved in administrative work: in addition to chairing the Philosophy Department, he revitalized the department’s weekly student-oriented Philosophy Forum sessions, directed the Classical Studies minor program, served in the Faculty Senate, led multiple attempts to protect and reform the General Education program, directed an NEH Faculty Development program, chaired the college-level Curriculum Committee, and served on dozens of other departmental and collegiate committees—all in order to fight tooth and nail for the twin pillars of student learning and faculty governance. Especially over the last decade of his career, he dedicated an outsized portion of his time and energy to attempts to quell both external and internal threats to SUNY Potsdam’s core mission of delivering a quality liberal arts education to its undergraduate students.
But if you ask Curry what he did for a living, he will say that he taught. He contributed directly to the liberal arts mission he holds so dear by teaching courses that spanned the entire history of Western thought—Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, 19th Century Continental Philosophy, Existentialism and Phenomenology—as well as courses in contemporary Metaphysics, Theory of Knowledge, Philosophy of Religion, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Mind. His introductory courses were particularly popular—his 100-level Human Nature course, for instance, took students on a millennia-spanning intellectual journey from the Book of Job to cutting-edge scholarship on race and racism. And when students had intellectual needs that nobody else at SUNY Potsdam could accommodate, he stepped up, going above and beyond his normal teaching duties to offer everything from Logic to Classical Greek to a tutorial on feminism. His classroom style was at once traditional (close readings of primary texts, plenty of chalk-and-talk, notoriously demanding grading standards) and experimental (running roleplaying games in which students reenacted the trial of Socrates). His unsurpassed excellence as a teacher was formally recognized by several awards and informally recognized by many thousands of students over the years, and is fittingly (if unsurprisingly) the central theme of many of the contributions to this festschrift.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Curry, D.C.K. (1992). Owen’s Proof in the Peri Ideôn and the Indeterminacy of Sensibles in Plato. Ancient Philosophy 12(2): 351-373.
Curry, D.C.K. (1995). Review of Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology. Philosophy in Review 15(2): 145-147.
Curry, D.C.K. (1995). Review of Graeme Hunter, ed., Spinoza: The Enduring Questions. Philosophy in Review 15(4): 254-256.
Curry, D.C.K. & Vann, W. (1995). La Angustia de Abraham: Un Análisis del Argumento Central de Temor y Temblor. Areté 7(1), 5-26.
Curry, D.C.K. (1998). Review of Richard N. Bosley and Martin Tweedale, eds., Basic Issues in Medieval Philosophy. Philosophy in Review 18(3): 163-165.
Curry, D.C.K. (2007). Blinded by the Light: A Reflection on the Teaching of Introductory Courses in Philosophy. In Badger, R. (Ed.), Ideas that Work in College Teaching, 67-75. SUNY Press.
Curry, D.C.K. (2013). Uselessness: A Panegyric. The Good Society 22(2), 236-246.
Curry, D.C.K. (2018). Of Games and Confrontations. In Cahn, S., Bradner, A., & Mills, A. (Eds.), Philosophers in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching, 145-158. Hackett.
Curry, D.C.K. (2024). The Gutting of the Liberal Arts. The Chronicle of Higher Education 70(17).