(d. 2024)
Professor Martha Brandt Bolton passed away on October 27, 2024. She was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and did her undergraduate work at Ohio Wesleyan University. After briefly studying at Tulane, she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. She spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and began her long career at Rutgers University in 1971, retiring only last year. When Martha arrived, Rutgers was divided into several residential colleges, each with its own philosophy department. Martha was at Livingston College, along with Howard McGary, Martin Bunzl, and Peter Klein. Brian McLaughlin joined the Livingston department in 1980. Martha was chair at Livingston, and participated in the creation of a unified Rutgers philosophy department in 1982. She was preceded in death by her husband, Professor Robert Bolton, who also joined Rutgers in 1971, and passed away in June of this year.
Martha’s work in the history of early modern philosophy has been wide-ranging and influential, illuminating the thought of famous figures such as Locke and Leibniz, and also shining a spotlight upon neglected philosophers from the period, such as Catharine Trotter and Mary Shepherd.
Martha produced a remarkable body of work on Locke over several decades: especially noteworthy are “Substances, Substrata and Names of Substances in Locke’s Essay” (Philosophical Review, 1976), “The Real Molyneux Question and the Basis of Locke’s Answer” (in G.A.J. Rogers, ed., Locke’s Philosophy, 1994), and “Locke on the Semantic and Epistemic Role of Simple Ideas of Sensation” (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2004).
Her contribution to Leibniz scholarship was no less important. Among these publications were the fruits of her extended consideration of the relationship between Locke and Leibniz, on which she gave a graduate seminar in the Spring of 1993. Martha contemplated writing a book on Leibniz’s New Essays. Ultimately, this research led to three very notable publications: “The Nominalist Argument of the New Essays” (The Leibniz Review, 1996), “Locke, Leibniz, and the Logic of Mechanism” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1998), and her introductory essay, “New Essays on Human Understanding” (in P. Lodge and L. Strickland, eds., Leibniz's Key Philosophical Writings A Guide, 2020).
Martha’s work on early modern women has also been very influential. “Some Aspects of the Philosophical Work of Catharine Trotter”—published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy in 1993, at a time when early modern women philosophers were taken much less seriously than they are today—would seem to be the first thing ever published by a philosopher on Catherine Trotter Cockburn. It made a lasting and convincing case for Cockburn’s importance. Her work on Mary Shepherd—the Stanford Encyclopedia entry and a series of papers—has also been important both in raising interest in Shepherd as a philosopher and in showing the complexity and sophistication of her thought.
Her influence also lives on in the work of her students. Four of them — Stewart Duncan, Paul Lodge, Antonia LoLordo, and Raffaella De Rosa — formed a scholarly community working closely with her in the late 90s and early 2000s. They recall Martha’s incredibly detailed notes for her notoriously long graduate seminars: pages of closely-typed text demonstrating the highest level of preparation and commitment to her students. They jointly share of their indebtedness to Martha:
None of us would be doing what we are doing now without Martha’s support and attention, and we are all very grateful for that. Her influence is subtle: she did not tell her students what to work on and she would never have expected us to promulgate her views, but looking back on what we’ve worked on over the years, we all see it coming up over and over again in different places in our own work. Martha published on Berkeley, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Shepherd, Spinoza, Trotter, and more, and her example gave us permission to work on lots of different philosophers. We miss her.
Raffaella De Rosa, now Chair of the philosophy department at Rutgers-Newark recalls Martha’s importance to her, personally:
I met Martha in Graduate School at Rutgers-New Brunswick. I was working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. When I read for the first time Fodor’s arguments that there can be no classical empiricist account of concept acquisition I was intrigued by his arguments, but I wanted to hear an expert opinion on them, the opinion of somebody whose expertise was on classical empiricism and rationalism. That person was Martha in the department. That first meeting was so impressive that it changed the direction of my studies in graduate school. I ended up working with Martha on early modern conceptions of the mind and concept acquisition. That was the significance of Martha’s impact on my intellectual life. She was my mentor and, later colleague. I learned much from her and her intellectual sharpness; and I will miss our discussions and exchanges. But she will always be a part of my intellectual life.
Philosophers will long be learning from her deep explorations of Locke, Leibniz, and many other well-known philosophers; and benefiting from the way she championed forgotten voices. Her Rutgers colleagues and former students will also long remember her for her good sense, wit, warmth, and kindness.
(Many hands)
