I received the email about Sandy on early on Saturday morning in the middle of a five hour visit to the Emergency Room, at a point at which it was not clear everything was going to be ok (don’t worry, it was). Still, and although his friends have all been preparing themselves for this, it was devastating. I didn’t think I’d talk about it here. But, although The NYT obit is very straightforward and accurate, it misses something that everyone who knew him will wish it had mentioned.

Sandy was already an intellectual hero of mine when I met him at a Spencer Foundation Board retreat in 2007. It’s not just that he wrote the best philosophy paper about equality in education, which as a sociologist he had no right to do, but because I had started reading his work when I committed myself to doing empirically informed political philosophy, and realised immediately that he was a sort of mirror of what I wanted to be: a normatively committed and informed social scientist who would never allow his values to guide him to empirically convenient results. We had a two hour break on the first afternoon and Sandy, who had never seen (or, I am sure, heard of) me in his life casually asked if I was busy, and would I like to take a walk with him. I managed to overcome my awe, and, well, Sandy was totally brilliant, and its not that he didn’t know that, but he seemed to be able to find whatever was most interesting in whatever you said to him so that the gap between you was irrelevant to the matter at hand. He didn’t seem to care what you status was — he talked as enthusiastically and openly with college presidents, other scholars, students, staff people, receptionists, interns. He could, and did, put anyone at their ease. I quickly saw that he was either determined not to observe, or, quite possibly, completely oblivious to, the iniquitous status hierarchies in academia: his democratic outlook was entirely authentic to him. (Now, reading what that sentence, I realise it’s exactly what I might just as well have written about my dad).

I’m an intellectual outlier in the worlds I inhabited with Sandy. Usually if we were at a workshop, conference, or meeting together (and we often were) I was the only philosopher in a room full of social scientists. But over the years I gradually observed the vast informal network of scholars who were specifically indebted to Sandy for his seemingly-effortless but vast kindness and support. You meet people and gradually realise they are connected to Sandy and when you reveal that you know him too their faces light up and they tell you some story about him that is always delightful and different. The NYT obit doesn’t really capture this. To match his intellectual brilliance and reach is unachievable for most of us. But to leave this world so aptly loved by so many is something we could all aspire to.