The Department of Philosophy is saddened to report that James LeRoy Celarier, 66, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, died August 13, 2001, in Washington, D.C. Jim came to Maryland in 1963 and taught for 36 years before his retirement in 1999.
Born in Chicago, Jim graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana and received a master's degree from Illinois and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, writing his dissertation on "Aristotle*s Physica and Plato's Parminides." His principle mentors were Max Fisch at Illinois, Glenn Morrow and Nelson Goodman at Pennsylvania, and G.E.L. Owen at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
What follows is the eulogy offered by Prof. John Brown at Jim's memorial service.
"Jim was certainly unlike any other philosopher I have ever known. He was no more idiosyncratic than lots of others. Philosophers are a hugely various lot, and there are many strikingly individualistic, even bizarre examples. Still, in my mind Jim holds a quite distinctive place in the space of possibilities. I won't try -- I wouldn't presume -- to summarize all the things that set him apart as a colleague and friend. I'll select just a few which are of personal interest to me, and try to describe them fairly.
"One thing all of us noticed was his extraordinarily active curiosity and industry not just about the things the rest of us took to be worthy of our educated attention, but about countless things that others were content to ignore or defer to some hypothetical future time. So he collected miscellaneous facts and in recent years retailed them to his colleagues in myriad memoranda. Recently I came across a fat folder full of his disquisitions on the etymology of proper names through the ages, on various saints whose days cropped up at salient times in the academic year -- if it was the feast day of the beheading of St. John it was time for students to arrive. The solstices and equinoxes were duly advertized and elucidated, along with arcana of Newtonian physics, Natural History, flora and fauna, and so on without end. Being within range of Jim was like living next to the proprietor of a WunderKabinet who was constantly hailing passersby to step inside and be amazed and enlightened by the profusion of esoterica inside. This publicity wasn't just mania, it was part of an effort to create more of an intellectual community, something a department of forty-some souls -- faculty and graduate students -- needs to cultivate much more than it is apt to do without such initiative as Jim's. I think of it also as a kind of evangelism aimed at making the rest of us more variously interested in the world and in human culture at large. However that may be it certainly reflected his own immersion in the world, an immersion that had in it a mixture of reverence and revulsion.
"The other aspect of Jim's I want to speak about, exercising the prerogative of a mourner, is an ensemble of attitudes that seems to me to link up with the asceticism of the desert fathers, one that motivated and sustained him and gave a gravity that included the intellectual but extended beyond it to the spiritual. It's composed of many strands -- an intolerance of intellectual humbug, a rigorism about the details of the great philosophical texts and its corollary, a skepticism about whether the great thinker really said this or that, or if he did, whether he knew what he was talking about. Aristotle and Plato were often excoriated for howling sophisms or plain unintelligibility. Optimizing interpretations invented by scholars to make the passage meaningful, to give befuddled readers the illusion of understanding, carried little credibility. The texts minutely examined all too often undercut all such interpretations, blocked path after path out of the maze. Yet the texts were still the texts, our best -- our only -- connection with the best of our philosophical progenitors. They are the city where we dwell, particularly if we are historians of philosophy, as Jim was. The texts were therefore still revered, still searched and probed for insights -- in a situation fraught with objective uncertainty. Jim thirsted after genuine wisdom and found too little of it to satisfy him in the sages of our discipline. Like them he genuinely, passionately, wanted the tangled skein of things to reveal its secrets. To me this fervor had at a deep level a religious quality, a yearning for thinkers one could honestly understand and reverence, and -- more widely -- for the world of matter and mind to be more intelligible and more beneficent than it is.
"In this connection the pathos of history was a big theme with Jim. Democritus, he said, was probably a greater philosopher than Plato but, worse luck, his works are lost (he didn't found a thousand year school). So the best of our ancient philosophic patrimony was perhaps a victim of the wreck of history.
"These somber reflections lead on to a yet more global theme that relates to the ascetic quality I am speaking of in Jim's philosophic personality. This is the refractory character of philosophical problems in general. Any philosophic doctrine pressed hard enough seems to end in conceptual tangles, muddles and mysteries. The relation of matter to mind, of properties to particulars, and all the other perennial topics of debate seem always to elude final solution. Since philosophers constitutionally reject objective mystery they must presume the fault lies in our thought, our conceptual foibles. Our thinking goes awry, somehow, and it costs great labor to straighten it out on some particular issue -- sometimes we seem to succeed, the fly gets out of this or that bottle, but we, it, never can escape from all the bottles. Philosophers have different responses to this. Jim I think was honest enough to confess it, and enough of an idealist to suffer because of it.
"Yet to the end he was engaged in thinking his way though as many conceptual thickets as he could, clarifying, untangling, unraveling, assembling relevant knowledge, and reveling in such light as he and others could cast. All his adult life he strove with real zest. And he celebrated the brilliance of the best intellectual achievements in philosophy and science despite the fact that in every direction sooner or later thought runs into darkness and uncertainty, even paradox. I think there is courage in this.
"I suppose what I mean could be expressed by saying that Jim was both intellectually honest and earnest, and it's the depth of that earnestness that most connects him (in my mind at least) with those ancient ascetics. His earnestness was at bottom a reverence for the good. It differed from that of the desert fathers, however, in that his did not depend on the consolations of literal belief. At least I believe that was so. I believe he had the wish, not the belief, in those unseen, comforting things. That was, I think -- and of course I speak under correction -- part of the special quality of his asceticism that will always have a revered place in my memory."
