A post by Emine Hande Tuna and Octavian Ion

We lost Adam Morton on October 22, 2020. Adam was a doctoral advisor to one of us and professor and friend of both. He taught at various institutes including Ottawa, Bristol, Princeton, Michigan, Oklahoma, Alberta, and British Columbia. Our paths crossed in Alberta where we both did our PhDs.

At the time we met him, Adam was the Canada Research Chair in Epistemology and Decision Theory. He wrote various influential pieces in both areas, such as Disasters and Dilemmas (which is about strategies for decision-making under difficult circumstances where incommensurable values and rational choices conflict), and Bounded Thinking: Intellectual Virtues for Limited Agents (which delineates epistemic virtues that are handy in managing our limitations, especially when rationality falls short). His work extends well beyond these fields. Adam’s philosophical work traces a broad trajectory through philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind, ethics, and other fields. In The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics he argues that we learn to act in ways that ensure the cooperation of others as the success of our actions depends on making ourselves intelligible to others and be understood by others. In Emotion and Imagination, Adam claims that imagination is required for us to experience a wider range of emotions. One of the implications is that in our engagements with others, putting ourselves in their place does not merely mean imagining their circumstances but it requires a certain skill that we should aim to cultivate. This skill is imagining what they might be imagining and which emotions are involved in this imagining. As a result, it is a virtue to imagine others’ emotional use of their imagination. On Evil is about our capacities for understanding how people can commit atrocious acts of evil. Adam’s goal is to expose how evil gets traction in the fabric of ordinary life and to resist conceptualizations of evil that place it in the realm of the extraordinary, and so beyond comprehension. Indeed, he claims that via certain shifts in our imaginings we can get a better grasp on our own and other people’s potentialities for evil. 

In Confessions of a Generalist, Adam reflects with humor and insight on his own body of work and talks about how he moved across the various fields he has worked in (cancelling his subscription to the Journal of Symbolic Logic and getting a subscription to Psychological Review, for instance, to mark his transition from phil of language to phil of mind). He also tries to determine what might have been the binding thread between his broad-ranging philosophical works. He thinks it might be his desire to make explicit what is implicitly assumed by us as thinkers, actors, and decision makers. We have been talking amongst ourselves about this for a while too. One defining feature of Adam’s philosophy we think is his genuine attempt at figuring out what makes people tick, how people work, and how people function together. This was not only a driving question for his later work in philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of emotions but it was operative much earlier even in some of his more formal work in logic and philosophy of language. His concerns with reference and anaphoric binding were deeply connected with an interest in how people keep track of things both within their own minds and together. One thing that jumps out at anyone familiar with Adam’s work and style of thinking is his focus on difficult cases, both existing ones and ones he cleverly concocted, in order to test the limits of philosophical theories. Often this manifested in the form of elaborate and subtle counterexamples he would raise after hearing a colloquium talk, much to the benefit of everyone present. 

One of the underlying themes we see in Adam’s prolific work is that we are limited and we need each other to act better, think better, imagine better, and feel better. And this also resonates with who Adam was, and how supportive he was of everyone’s work. We both have experienced his generosity. 

Hande: I’ve always felt Adam’s help and encouragement. To pick just one of his many acts of kindness, I think back to when he invited me to take part on a panel on the ethics and politics of Michael Haneke’s movies. I was just an MA student at the time. We had talked for over an hour about Haneke at a department party, and the next day I received an invitation to present alongside him on this panel that he had been asked to participate in. And that was just the beginning. His invaluable support and belief in me continued especially as I started exploring topics which he was working on, such as the imagination and emotion. 

Octavian: From my very first exchange with Adam when I arrived at University of Alberta, I knew I was in for a treat: “What month you born in?” “July” “You should have been born in August.” Adam was always willing to give so much of his time and effort to supporting my ideas and engaging with me, both during my doctoral work and long after, and I feel so lucky to have benefited from our conversations. Looking back at drafts of chapters I sent him is an experience I cherish. There is the text in black of the writing I sent him, followed by Adam’s comments in red, followed by my responses in blue, his responses in green, mine in purple, his in brown, etc. Often these colorful back-and-forths would veer off course into discussions of music, meditation, films, and anecdotes, that were so much more rewarding to me than mere academic feedback from an advisor. His intellectual energy was electrifying. 

It would be difficult to overstate the positive effect that Adam had on the department at University of Alberta and not only through his astute comments at colloquia and lively conversations on all matters philosophical and otherwise. Adam’s seminars at Alberta were packed, and with good reason. Picture an epistemology seminar where the themes are explored in relation to events in Buñuel’s underappreciated comedic masterpiece The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz! He started a popular film club -- Dinner-Video-Drink -- that brought everyone together and which we jointly ran from 2007 until 2010 either at his place or ours. Dinners at Adam’s place meant a good bowl of mainly nutritious chili, but we forgave him for it as he was such an excellent host and just a lovely person to be around.  

He was an extraordinary philosopher, he was an extraordinary person, who will be truly missed. 

You can find links to Adam’s published work on his Phil Papers Profile and read his published and unpublished work, both philosophical and literary, on his website.

Adam also was a contributor to The Junkyard. He wrote one blog post on his damage project and another on rehearsal in imagination. 

Emine Hande Tuna is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz. Prior to that, she was a SSHRC postdoctoral researcher at Brown University. She works on contemporary issues in value theory, in particular moral psychology and aesthetics, and on the history of these fields. She was the recipient of the John Fisher Memorial Prize in aesthetics.

Octavian Ion is currently completing a Masters of Museum Studies degree at University of Toronto and is a Digital Projects intern at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre. He has written a dissertation in Philosophy of Language on belief ascription puzzles and draws mixed-media abstract portraits in his spare time.