Minerva's Aviary: Philosophy at Toronto, 1843–2003

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

This long history of the University of Toronto Philosophy
Department—and the smaller departments at the University’s federated
institutions—is an encyclopedic chronicle focusing on matters relating
to academic administration. The first part deals with thinkers such as
James Beaven, George Paxton Young, and George Brett, who have already
been examined at length in Armour and Trott’s The Faces of Reason;
emphasis here again is on the relations of philosophical and religious
studies. Slater’s discussions of the philosophy faculty since World
War II offer brief curricula vitae embellished with anecdotes and
personal reflections. Slater himself taught in the department from 1964
to 1995. Because of the enormous number of people who have been
associated with academic philosophy at Toronto since the war, Slater
speaks at length about only two: departmental chairs Fulton Anderson and
Thomas Goudge.

For many philosophers and historians of ideas, Slater’s work will
invite comparison with Bruce Kuklick’s masterly 1977 history of the
Harvard Philosophy Department. Kuklick’s work offers detailed and
sophisticated discussions of competing philosophical worldviews and the
significance of these worldviews for American culture. Slater’s study,
however, makes only a very limited contribution to the fields of history
of philosophy, intellectual history, and Canadian studies. To some
extent, Slater has been disadvantaged in this regard by the
extraordinary number of people associated with philosophical studies at
Toronto, particularly since World War II; and Slater has made an earnest
effort to bring into his narrative as many of these people as possible.
Slater has diligently attended to a great deal of archival material, but
it is not entirely clear toward what end. A closing chapter, “Some
Reflections on This History,” is only four pages long and offers
little insight into the value of the project. It is hard to gauge from
Slater’s chronicle, among other things, how well over the years the
philosophy programs and faculty at Toronto have actually attended to the
needs of their students. The book contains appendixes, a bibliography,
an index, and some pleasing photographs of Toronto philosophy
professors, a number of whom, now deceased, I knew well and remember
fondly.