DrayWilliamHElectedin196719212009

H ILLIARD A RONOVITCH William H. Dray
1921-2009
William H. (Herbert) Dray - Bill, to all who knew him - died peacefully at the age of 88 at the Veterans Wing of Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. The manner and place of his passing befitted his quiet demeanour and his loyal service as an RCAF navigator in World War II and beyond, 1941-1946. But they did not signify his prominence as one of Canada’s leading philosophers and his international eminence throughout his long professional life in his chosen field of the philosophy of history. Elected to the Royal Society in 1967, a Killam Fellow in 1980-1981 and a winner of the prestigious Molson Prize in 1986, he had taught at the University of Toronto 1953-1968, becoming a Full Professor in 1963, then at Trent 1968-1976 where he served also as Chair of Philosophy for five years, before moving on to the bilingual context of the University of Ottawa, 1976-1985, from which he retired and became Emeritus. Along the way there were Visiting positions at Harvard and Stanford, and a record of publications that continue as landmarks in his field. These include, as author: Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford University Press, 1964), Philosophy of History (Prentice-Hall, 1964); Perspectives on History (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), On History and Philosophers of History (Brill, 1989), History as Re-Enactment: R. G. Collingwood's Idea of History (Oxford University Press, 1995); and as editor or co-editor: Philosophical Analysis and History (Harper & Row, 1966), Substance and Form in History: A Collection of Essays in Philosophy of History, R. G. Collingwood: The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History (Oxford University Press, 1999).
To grasp the significance and distinctiveness of Bill Dray's intellectual contribution, it is necessary to note a basic distinction regarding the area in which he worked. The field of philosophy of history is actually divided up into two camps: an analytical one and a speculative one. The analytical camp attained dominance in the profession of academic philosophy from the 20th century or so onward, while the latter was more practiced by earlier philosophers. Analytical philosophy of history explores the logic of historical explanation and associated conceptual questions about the discipline and the practice of history: it asks, for example, whether or how far the concepts and categories of historians should be those of the social sciences, seeking or applying general laws of human behaviour which are conceived of as the counterpart to the laws of physics and the other natural sciences. Speculative philosophy of history takes up the concern of non-philosophers for whether history as a whole has a meaning and what that might be; it offers up a pattern or point to history. Bill Dray's orientation was on the side of analytical philosophy of history: in it he elaborated precise renderings and often resolutions of technical issues; his approach, though, was always inspired by humanistic concerns and manifested a knowledge of major speculative theorists.
Bill Dray’s academic training was in both history and philosophy, with a B.A. (history) from the University of Toronto, in 1949, followed by a B.A. (P.P.E) in 1951, M.A. in 1955, and D. Phil. in 1956, all from Oxford. Throughout his career, William Dray (the formality for a moment seems apt) refined and defended three crucial and connected ideas concerning the task of the historian, all in the service of supporting a properly empirical and evidence-based approach to history, but not a rigidly scientific (or positivistic) one. The three ideas in summary ideas are:
instead of general laws (or the "covering law model" of explanation) the need for a kind of reenactment by the historian, intellectually rather than emotionally, of the historical agent’s aims and intentions; the unavoidability of appraisal of these as part of historical explanation so as to determine their rationale; the importance for historical understanding of seeing connections akin to those of a narrative or a grouping of events rather than discovering causes and regularities. These elements are here merely mentioned; in Dray’s work they are elaborated with detail and subtlety, and often with concrete applications to controversies among historians that continually preoccupied Dray, including the causes of the 17th Century English Civil War and the Second World War.
Dray’s wide knowledge of history in addition to philosophy and his innovative ideas informed his roles as a teacher and a supervisor of graduate researchers, in which regards he was much sought after and respected; as a colleague he was ever congenial and always conscientious and unassuming. At the time of his passing, Bill was survived by wife Doris, whom he married in 1943, a son, Christopher, a daughter, Elizabeth, two sisters and an extended family.
Hilliard Aronovitch
Department of Philosophy
University of Ottawa
(Author’s title given as of the time of writing)。