Bob Solomon and Kathleen Higgins’ ‘80s Love Story

Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins have a more-or-less typical love story — it’s just that Nietzsche was their matchmaker. Solomon joined the faculty of UT Austin’s Department of Philosophy in 1972 and Higgins joined a decade later. Over the course of a few years in the early ‘80s, their academic collaboration grew into the love of a lifetime, one that animated both their scholarship and their writing. And while Solomon passed away in 2007, for Higgins, it still does.  (...) 

Read more at Life & Letters. (Photo courtesy of Kathleen Higgins, as featured in Life & Letters) 

Robert Solomon Obituary  

Once a month or so, Robert Solomon and his friend James Pennebaker would meet for beer and conversation at a Guadalupe Street watering hole, the Dog & Duck. Most of the time, Solomon, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, and Pennebaker, a UT psychology professor, would talk about what people usually talk about at bars: "The nature of emotions, from both a philosophical and a neuroscientific perspective," Pennebaker recalled Thursday. (...)

Read more at Austin American-Stateman

Robert Solomon Remembered  Robert C. Solomon died on January 2, just after coming off a plane in Zurich. He was not quite 65 years old. His extraordinary vitality, which several of his friends had once again enjoyed at the American Philosophical Association just five days earlier, meant that his death was a great shock even to those who knew that he suffered from a congenital heart malformation and had been told early on that he was unlikely to live long. Thus warned, he packed his life with work and joy as if indeed each day would be his last.(...)

Read more at American Society for Aesthetics

According to a widely accepted view, which I share, philosophy and rationality fit together like hand and glove. The method of philosophy is none other than reasoning, and some would define philosophy as simply that method applied to the most basic questions of existence. Rationality is also commonly recommended by philosophers as the most excellent virtue: the essence of the good life. Thus, a certain antipathy has come to characterize philosophy’s relationship to the passions. Philosophy is best done with a cool head, and emotion would seem to be the opposite of that and hence the enemy of virtue. The philosopher Robert Solomon saw things differently. (...)

Read more at Philosophy now

Philosophers “don’t like to talk about” grief, wrote Robert C. Solomon, the longtime Quincy Lee professor of business and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, in his last book, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford University Press, 2007). That’s because philosophers aren’t grief counselors or therapists, he explained. The “bereaved,” Solomon counseled, “should look elsewhere than to philosophy for solace.” (...)

Read more at The Chronicle of Higher 

Jan. 20 Public Service Set for Professor Robert Solomon

In lieu of flowers, contributions in memory of Solomon may be made to Oxfam International. For more information about the public service, contact the Department of Philosophy at 512-471-4857. Solomon died in the Zurich, Switzerland, airport. Swiss medical authorities said the cause of death was pulmonary hypertension.

Solomon, the Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy and a Distinguished Teaching Professor, published more than 40 books on ethics and the history of philosophy, (...) 

Read more at UT News

After Enron, Arthur Andersen and Tyco collapsed a few years ago, U.S. federal investigators tried to identify who was responsible for the corporate mismanagement and misdeeds that shook the economy and the American public’s trust in business leaders. 

As prosecutors charged C.E.O.s and top executives with tampering with evidence to cover their tracks, Robert C. Solomon, philosophy professor at The University of Texas at Austin and author of “A Better Way to Think About Business,” helped people make sense of the psychology behind the seemingly self-destructive behavior of the former corporate giants. (...)

Read more at Life & Letters. (Photo  featured in Life & Letters) 

Memorial Minutes Robert C. Solomon

Robert C. Solomon, 1942-2007 Bob Solomon was born on September 14, 1942, in Detroit. He was the first son of Vita Petrosky Solomon, an artist, and Charles M. Solomon, a lawyer who was serving as an FBI agent at the time Bob was born. The family moved to Philadelphia, the hometown of both of Bob's parents, after World War II ended. Bob's two brothers, Andy and Jon, were born there in 1946 and 1950, respectively.

Read more at Jstor. (Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 81, No. 5 (May, 2008), pp. 169-171 (3 pages))

Robert Solomon (1942-2007)* Robert Solomon was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Philosophy and Business at the University of Texas at Austin, a valued colleague, an admired teacher, and one of the foremost thinkers on philosophical accounts of the emotions. If “Emotions and Choice” and The Passions were the only works that Solomon produced, his contribution to thinking about the emotions would have been assured. But there is much more. These early works present significant statements of views that he continued to develop, expand and adapt. (...) 

Read more at Queen's University. Citation: Leighton, S. (2009). Robert Solomon (1942-2007).

I am very sorry to report that my colleague Bob Solomon died suddenly on January 2, while travelling in Zurich.  I will link to a memorial notice as soon as one is available.  His breadth of philosophical interests was remarkable, including Continental philosophy, business ethics, Non-Western philosophy, and philosophy of mind, though it is probably fair to say that he is best known among philosophers for his seminal work on the philosophy of the emotions and on existentialism.  His 1972 book From Rationalism to Existentialism:  The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds may still be the single best introductory text on existentialism in English, and his 1976 book on The Passions is a classic in the literature on the emotions.  He was also an enormously popular teacher and lecturer, and a member of the University's Academy of Distinguished Teachers. 

Read more at Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog