Three years ago Richard Boyd died. I saw the 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 think about it.

Dick Boyd. He could’ve stopped teaching undergraduates early in his life. He certainly could’ve stopped later in life. But he didn’t, because he loved it, and 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. Really a moralist, to use an old term. He ranged over everything - from philosophy of language and logic to mathematics, which he studied with Putnam at MIT - but in all his work he was most of all humane.

His key intellectual contribution was rejecting simplistic categories in both science and society. Take his work on biological species: instead of rigid definitions, he argued for seeing species as clusters of related properties, where no single trait was essential. This wasn’t just biology - it was his whole worldview, extending to how he saw society and politics.

He was a realist and consequentialist above all. 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 even dared to venture into some later Lewis, which confused everyone. When I scribbled Barcan’s Formula on the blackboard, I lost the entire class completely, and he laughed that 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 that I should go into teaching. I didn’t, but those three hours still changed my life. Some time later, when I became serious about actually doing it, he asked me: “can you do anything else besides philosophy? Do that if you can”, and he changed my life again.

Now despite his exacting scientific realism, his naturalism and materialism, it turns out 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.

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