University Times

Joseph Lee Camp Jr., professor emeritus of philosophy, died Jan. 17, 2013, in St. Louis, following a long hospitalization. He was 70.

A native of Suffern, New York, Camp earned a bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University and completed his graduate study in philosophy at Brown University, earning a master’s degree in 1965 and a PhD in 1967.

Camp joined Pitt’s philosophy department in 1967 as an assistant professor. His specialties were in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language and 17th-century philosophy, especially Descartes and Locke.

Camp was promoted to associate professor in 1972 and became a full professor in 1989. He held a secondary appointment as a senior fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Science and chaired Pitt’s philosophy department 1987-91. He left the department due to health issues in 2005 and in 2008 moved to St. Louis in order to be near family members.

Remembered by colleagues as unconventional as well as brilliant and funny, Camp was known for his colorful language. “He was a down–to-earth guy,” colleague Robert Brandom, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, said, recalling Camp’s affinity for “poker and brown liquor” and his “country boy” style behind the wheel of a pickup truck.

Camp had an atypical childhood. “A dominant fact that shaped his life was that he’d had polio as a kid. It left him with a twisted spine, humpbacked and hunched over,” Brandom said. In addition, as the son of two doctors, Camp was raised in close proximity to a large state mental hospital where they worked.

“Those conditions of his childhood gave him a different view of human beings than he might have had otherwise,” Brandom noted.

“Looking at him, he was the last person you’d think was an academic — he looked like a twisted up good ol’ boy,” Brandom said. “And if you heard he was an academic, the last thing you’d think was he was a philosophy professor. He enjoyed that dissonance.”

Although colleagues remembered Camp as a deep philosopher, he published little. In addition to a handful of articles, Camp authored “Confusion: A Study in the Theory of Knowledge,” published in 2002.

Following the death in 2000 of his partner, Tamara Horowitz, the first woman to chair Pitt’s philosophy department, Camp edited a collection of her writings, “The Epistemology of A Priori Knowledge,” published in 2006.

Departmental colleague Mark Wilson said, “He was more useful to the development of the profession than people who published six times as much.”

Brandom added, “He didn’t do a lot of writing, but when he did, his writing was of the highest possible quality.

“He was well known for talking philosophy rather than writing philosophy. He fell into a relatively small group at the high end of the profession that was true of — you don’t know them from their writings but they are famous.”

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Camp was known for keeping late hours. Brandom said, “Nobody ever saw him before 3 in the afternoon.” And his seminars were legendary for stretching long into the night. Where other seminars typically were scheduled for two and a half or three hours, “His were seldom less than six or seven hours … They ended when people drifted away,” Brandom said. “It was a pure seminar in the Socratic sense.”

The sessions would examine the importance of philosophical issues that were being pondered 2,000 years ago, “ones that people had made no progress on,” Brandom said. “He wasn’t going to pretend we’d sorted it out … but we were going to talk about it for as long as it took.”

Their pace reflected a timelessness, “all done in a cool twilight hour with no external pressures,” Brandom said.

“Everyone understood it didn’t matter whose mouth a remark had come out of. It would be picked apart and chewed on until we decided what to make of it and by then we’d forget whose mouth it had come out of.”

Camp’s classes, unique in their own right, were important to the sociology of the department, Brandom said. “Students got to know each other in his classes more than in any other.”

Wilson said, “His students loved that he’d give them enormous amounts of time,” adding that appointments with Camp might be scheduled for 11 p.m. with talk of philosophy not commencing until the wee hours of the morning.

He was known as a master of the Socratic style of teaching. “He purposely did not put across his own point of view but made skeptical observations or made suggestions on what people should read,” Wilson said, adding that in some sessions, Camp would pose an enigmatic question, then sit in silence until someone in the group decided to speak, Wilson said.

University of Alberta faculty member Allen Hazen, who earned his PhD at Pitt under Camp’s direction, said,  “He would challenge students to make assertions, and when they did would challenge them to clarify them and defend them. The wording of his challenges was typically aggressive and even insulting … but I don’t think any student was offended: It was too clear to all of us that Joe saw us as engaged in a mutual effort to get clear about the philosophical issues, and that the insults were light-hearted, friendly and meant only to stimulate us into thinking harder.  At the end of a seminar we were often left in doubt as to his own beliefs, but much clearer about the issues and the difficulties.”

“He produced in his teaching,” said Distinguished Professor Emeritus Nuel Belnap, who labeled Camp “a philosopher’s philosopher,” adding, “He was marvelous at explaining everything at great lengths.” Belnap said, “He didn’t sugarcoat things. He didn’t make it look easy. It was hard and he showed it was hard.”

Hazen said that Camp also would invite graduate students to his home on Saturday nights to watch TV and talk.  “Conversation was by no means exclusively philosophical. It was generally believed that he did much of his philosophical work after visitors had gone home, sitting in front of a blank television from the end of transmission ’til daybreak.”

Hazen said, “Someone ignorant of his specialty witnessing these afternoons and evenings would have seen why many of us graduate students valued and loved him as a friend, but might well have had to listen in for an hour or more before realizing that we were philosophers,” Hazen recalled.  “But there was never any doubt about his philosophical power, and if he felt it appropriate he could give spontaneous philosophical lectures better than most of us can give prepared ones.”

In addition to influencing students directly through his interactions, Camp had a hand in shaping the philosophy department’s direction during his time as chair.

Belnap recalled with amusement that Camp, who had been known for his casual, even disheveled, appearance, abruptly upgraded his style of dress when he was named department chair. “When he first became chair, the first thing he did was go out and buy some suits. He showed up every day in suits,” Belnap recalled, adding that Camp surprised some by his success in the position. “We thought we were taking a big chance, but he was wonderful,” Belnap said. “It was a happy department.”

Brandom said Camp was a formidable figure as a department chair. “He did not suffer fools —luckily he didn’t have any in his colleagues — but he had a short way with administrative nonsense. And an infallible knack at keeping his eye on the ball.”

Brandom credited Camp with a strategic vision that has shaped the department to this day. “Today’s strengths can be attributed in part to his good judgment and steady hand,” he said. “A number of the pillars of the department now were junior faculty recruited during Joe’s time as chair,” he said. “As he’d say, he was a ‘good judge of philosophical horseflesh’ in building the stable to race for Pitt.”

Camp is survived by sons John and David Camp; daughter Jennifer Smith; grandsons Sam Camp and Louis Smith; sister Alice Katzung, and former wife Deborah Danielson.

The family suggests contributions to the Joseph L. Camp Memorial Fund, in care of Collie Henderson, 1001 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh 15260.

The philosophy department plans to hold a memorial gathering for Camp on Sept. 27.

—Kimberly K. Barlow