GARETH EVANS
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A LIFE OF THE MIND Peter Heller (Year 13), written for The Alleynian , 2024
Gareth Evans (57-63) was a British philosopher who made substantial contributions to logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his posthumous work The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell. Widely regarded as one of the leading philosophers of his generation, Evans died in 1980 at the age of 34. In 2024 Dulwich College recognised Gareth's extraordinary legacy to the world of philosophy through the naming of The Evans Room which will help to keep alive the memory of a man whose loss, according to the psychologist Jeffrey Gray, will always be “hard to measure, impossible to express”. Born in 1946 at the beginning of the post-war baby boom, Evans grew up in a middle-class family on the Larkhall Estate in the Streatham-Clapham borderlands. Welsh by heritage and by temperament, Evans felt a strong connection with Wales throughout his life, describing his holidays there as some of the happiest moments of his life. Evans joined Dulwich in 1957 as part of the Dulwich Experiment, through which subsidised places were offered by the London County Council to the most academically talented boys. In fact, this era is often considered the College’s zenith, frequently featuring at the top of the league tables and regularly sending more boys to Oxford and Cambridge than any other school. Evans quickly developed a reputation for being precocious, although this occasionally translated into audaciousness when facing his teachers. His school reports make for fascinating reading. EN Williams, his English teacher, was very generous in his praise, writing with reports ranging from: “Excellent. A stimulating and fluent member of the set” to “Excellent in every way, and winning all down the line his battle with the English language.” Other teachers were less complimentary. He was often criticised for his unwieldy writing style, with History teacher Mark Whittaker, usually congratulatory, writing, “Stimulating, even arrogant, in discussion, thorough in reading and notes, over-dogmatic, even eccentric in essay work.” Despite these minor niggles, Evans passed his A levels with flying colours and took up a place at University College, Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. At university, Evans had the good fortune of being tutored by the legendary, yet at the time old-fashioned, philosopher Peter Strawson. According to Evans, tutorials with Strawson were akin to “interviews with God”, and this admiration went both ways, with Evans quickly becoming his protégé. Evans was also taught by the eminent philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe (who referred to him as “first class”) and the great AJ Ayer, both of whom were instrumental in Evans’s academic development. After graduating in 1967 with the ‘best First for many a year’, Evans travelled to the United States to take up a teaching position at Harvard University. Whilst in America, Evans decided to embark on a road trip with one of his closest friends, Arnold Cragg, to get to Berkeley. Other trips included an inauspicious visit to Mexico City, where he was shot in the knee, and where, shockingly, the friend accompanying him was killed after a run-in with local cartels. In what was a remarkable reflection of his intellectual power and pedagogical ability, Evans was made a Fellow of University College soon after his graduation at the age of 23, a rare feat for someone who had only completed a bachelor’s degree. As a tutor, Evans was praised for his dynamic and engaging style, ready to critique his own lines of thinking as much as those of his students. He also had a reputation of setting a high premium on hard work, being known for kicking students out of tutorials when they weren’t concentrating. In early June 1980 Gareth was diagnosed with cancer. He married Antonia Phillips on 11th June and died on 10th August. Evans’s contribution to philosophy cannot be overstated. Following his death, The Varieties of Reference , the work often considered to be his masterpiece, was published. In it, he explains the different kinds of references to objects that need to be made before recognition occurs. Evans’s death to cancer left a huge void in philosophy, with his mentor Peter Strawson writing: “He achieved much in a short time and would have achieved much more, had he lived.”
The Dulwich College uniform has not changed much since these photographs, boater excepted.
Standing with Gwynne Ovenstone, College Secretary at University College from 1950-87. University College, Oxford
(Photographs courtesy of Elaine Evans.)
Illustration by Jack Seymour
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