Three years ago Richard Boyd died. I saw news on a Cornell website in the middle of a working day and didn’t have time to think about it. So I didn’t.

Dick Boyd. He could’ve stopped teaching undergraduates early in life. He could’ve stopped later in life. But he didn’t, because he loved it, and so kept teaching to stoned, bored, trivial 20 year olds.

And so I met him.

He taught philosophy of science, and was known for that, but he was an ethicist at heart I think. Or a moralist, to use an old term. He ranged over everything: philosophy of language and logic to mathematics, which he studied with Putnam at MIT.

His idea was rejecting simple categories in both science and society. Take his work on biological species: instead of rigid definitions, he argued for species as clusters of related properties, where no single trait was essential. This is lively right, 35 years later. Arctic birds proved it out.

His thinking was exact, moral. Outcomes were either good or bad, and there was a fact of the matter. The literal good depended on it.

His socks were always mismatched.

I was so insecure those days about what I knew in philosophy. And yet, as an undergrad, he let me teach an entire three-hour seminar about “Putnam & Natural Kinds” to his group of grad students. I covered Twin Earth, Kripke’s gold, and dared venture into later Lewis, which confused everyone. I scribbled Barcan’s Formula on the blackboard, and lost the entire class completed; he laughed I had gone too far. I was terrified. Soon everyone left, and I went back to my notebook. He said I did a brilliant job, and I should go into teaching.

I didn’t, but those three hours changed my life. A few months later, when I became serious about his life, he asked me: “can you do anything else besides this? Do that if you can”, and he changed my life again.

Despite his scientific realism, his naturalism, his materialism, Dick thought a lot about religion.

He knew grace like a Christian theologian, and he could talk gnosticism as well as he could talk physicalism. He thought about ethics deeper than most, and he wanted us to do good things.

Whether our souls live on after this life, we will never know. But I really hope his will.