TIM MURPHY
One of the biggest perks of working at SUNY Potsdam for twelve years was that my office was always immediately adjacent to David Curry’s, a proximity which allowed me to easily pester him with questions and solicit advice on all sorts of topics. If I was thinking about trying some new way of teaching something, I’d run it by David. If I had a question about how to navigate SUNY bureaucracy, the quickest way to an answer was to ask David. And, of course, if I had a question about a philosophical issue (or just some philosophical point I wanted to talk about), I had David right there. This was, admittedly, not so good a deal for David, and I’m sure he often wished I’d leave him alone to get on with his work, but he never indicated so, and was always gracious with his time. My ability to pick his brain about matters both mundane and philosophically rich has put me in a particularly fine position to say something about his considerable merits as a philosopher, colleague and friend, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to offer him some thanks for his forbearance over the years.
There’s a lot to say about David’s skills as a teacher and his commitment to the vocation of teaching, but to a great extent, his immense success as a teacher can be explained rather simply: he cares deeply about his students and he believes that learning philosophy is good for them. That he cares deeply about his students is made evident in a myriad of ways, from his tireless efforts to constantly refine his teaching methods, to his constant generosity with his time outside of the classroom, to his relationships with all his students, past and present. This deep concern for his students has combined with a carefully considered view of the value of philosophical inquiry to result in an extraordinarily effective and meaningful career in education that has benefitted generations of students.
It’s no secret that David is widely considered, by both students and colleagues, to be one of the finest teachers at SUNY Potsdam. Students flock to his classes year after year not because he offers an easy A (quite the opposite, in fact), nor because the subject matter chases the trends of the day, but because they recognize that he offers them something uniquely valuable, and increasing rare in today’s educational environment: the opportunity to grapple with matters of genuine import to human life, in a rigorous manner, under the guidance of a teacher who genuinely cares about their intellectual progress.
David treats his students as adults. He understands that many of them arrive in his classroom unprepared to do college level work, but rather than giving up on them and watering down the material, he puts in the effort required to enable them a chance of building up their skills, thus giving them the opportunity for real intellectual growth.Students see that they are respected, and also that David understands that what he is asking of them isn’t easy. Serious study of philosophy often requires the student to challenge cherished beliefs and to seriously consider the possibility that one has spent one’s entire life operating under significant moral and intellectual illusions. David’s teaching is sensitive to how disorienting this can be, without shying away from it, and he has a particular knack for communicating that he is on their side as they make the journey.
In the face of relentless pressure to pander and coddle, David has consistently held students to a high standard, expecting them to rise to a level of academic performance appropriate to higher learning. His popularity as a teacher reflects his students’ recognition of this as a sign of confidence in them, as well as his commitment to ensuring that they have the academic support needed to achieve these standards. He is endlessly generous with his time and energy. In addition to making the ideas as accessible as possible through his skilled handling of philosophical material in class, David tirelessly makes himself available to students outside of class, willing to spend hours talking to students in office hours. In my years of sharing an office wall, I witnessed a seemingly unending string of students taking advantage of David’s open door office policy, and heard him working through material, illuminating the broader philosophical context of the work being covered, and, perhaps most significantly, offering them the opportunity to talk through philosophical problems with someone who is both a great expert and a great listener.
As significant as it is, David’s work with students in formal classroom and office settings is just a part of his contribution to the life of philosophy on campus (and indeed, in the region). For decades, he was the driving force behind the weekly meetings of the SUNY Potsdam Philosophy Forum. Forum meetings provided an avenue for everyone in the community to come together and do philosophy. It was an integral part of the academic program and for many students a significant part of being a major was regular participation in Forum. However, its reach also extended well beyond majors and minors. Regular attendees included students from a variety of majors, faculty members from other disciplines, and the community at large. It is no exaggeration to say that Forum at Potsdam provided a center for the philosophical life of the community, with frequent participation by philosophers in the area, including faculty from the Associated Colleges and the local parish priest. David’s commitment to Forum was unwavering. With two or three hour meetings weekly throughout the term, advising Forum effectively amounted to an extra class on top of his already substantial teaching load, and David put the same energy and care into it as he did his classes. I have no doubt that among the fondest SUNY Potsdam memories of many students is the time spent on Thursday nights discussing philosophical puzzles, seeing peers present their work (and presenting their own), watching and discussing movies, and playing philosophically-minded games. (Much hummus, cookies and pizza was also consumed.)
Forum activities also extended off campus, with yearly trips to conferences (most frequently the Oneonta Undergraduate Philosophy Conference), where students got a chance to interact with peers from other schools and present their papers in a professional setting. David was always justly proud of the quality of Potsdam students’ presentations, which were inevitably among the best at the conference, demonstrating that a tiny department at a small state college could more than hold its own in terms of the quality of its philosophical preparation.
The community fostered by the Forum is reflective of a lot about David’s approach to philosophy and education, in that it reaches across multiple domains of life, with elements that are social and personal as well as academic and intellectual. David is a particularly effective advocate of an Aristotelian approach to education in which philosophy finds its value as both a way of better understanding the world and of successfully living within the world. Aristotle saw the highest role for education in its potential to enable a particularly elevated form of human activity (“leisure”), a role David memorably characterizes in his paper “Uselessness: A Panegyric.”
Paradigmatically, for Aristotle, leisurely activities involve philosophical contemplation, broadly construed as the kind of thinking we engage in when struggling with philosophical, literary, anthropological, sociological, political or scientific problems for the sake of the struggle itself—merely for the sake of sorting them out, as opposed to having them be sorted.
David follows Aristotle and Plato in recognizing the value that conscious, rigorous reflection on how one lives one’s life, along with genuine, open-minded curiosity about the nature of the world one finds oneself in, can bring. This picture of the value of education broadly, and of the value of philosophical inquiry in particular, is powerful and compelling, but also increasingly endangered, most obviously by a preoccupation with education as strictly job training, but also by host of other countervailing social forces too depressing to cover here (and probably too familiar to need to cover). David has remained dedicated to this ideal of education throughout his career, tirelessly defending this picture of the value of liberal arts in the face of seemingly insurmountable resistance from the institutions around him. While this ideal may be hopelessly dead at the college to which David devoted his career, his dedication to it lives on through the generations of students affected, both directly and indirectly, by his years of efforts to bring meaning, coherence, and richness to their educational experience.
David’s successes guiding the general education program at Potsdam and as a teacher of philosophy would not be possible without his considerable skills as a philosopher. The coherence and richness of the conception of liberal arts that informs his general education work reflects his ability to bring the insights of serious, often difficult, philosophical work to bear on issues of contemporary life. I have always particularly admired his ability to do this with respect to older works. The rigor with which he approaches history of philosophy requires a complex of interrelated skills in both history and philosophy. He has a wide foundation of knowledge of philosophy, both historical and contemporary, that enables him to engage not just with the work at hand, but backwards into that work’s predecessors and influences and forward into the work’s relevance to philosophical ideas that followed it. To this foundation of philosophical and historical knowledge he adds a particular skill at inhabiting the perspective of the philosopher he is reading in order to reconstruct their reasoning and understand the philosophical problems they are grappling with, as they see them. This ability is all the more impressive considering the range of historical eras, philosophical schools, social milieux and theoretical perspectives he engages with in his capacity as the sole historian of philosophy for the department. His enthusiasm for his specialization in Ancient Greek thought is obvious, but he is also a reliable source of insight into historically important philosophers across the discipline, able to explain intricate points of detail on work ranging from Plato to Descartes to Kierkegaard.
In addition to his considerable expertise in the history of philosophy, David is conversant in topics across the field. I could (and did) ask him questions about philosophical areas of all sorts, and he would, without fail, not only be familiar with the issue, but have a thoughtful, well worked out perspective on it. I learned an enormous amount of philosophy over the years just through bringing half-formed questions into David’s office and leaving with a clearer picture of the issue I started with, as well as a wealth of insights that hadn’t even been on my radar.
I hope that the above has done some justice to David’s merits as a philosopher, teacher, and colleague. I’d like to end by saying something about the kind of person he is and what his friendship has meant to me and to my family. I arrived in Potsdam thirteen years ago, having dragged my wife and two young children 1500 miles across the country, far away from our extended family and friends. To say that David and Denise made us feel welcome in our new home would be something of an understatement. We’ve lived just down the street from the Currys as long as we’ve been here, and their doors have always been open to us. Their generosity and support has been unceasing, from regularly inviting us to meals, to helping out with household challenges, to watching our kids when I’ve been hit with medical emergencies. It is hard to imagine anything they possibly could have done to support us that they have not done, a fact for which we will be eternally grateful.