McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Jeremy Walker Fonds
Fonds
3 m of textual records.
220 photographs.
Jeremy Desmond Bromhead Walker was born in Magwan Porth, Cornwall, England in 1936. His father, Colonel James Gerald Bromhead Walker, was an officer in the British Army in India and his mother was Sylvia Patricia Pollard Lowsley. Jeremy was educated at the King’s School in Canterbury, the Dragon School and Trinity College, Oxford. His only sibling was his brother, Antony Jeremy Bromhead Walker. After graduating from Oxford with an M A (Oxon) in 1964, Jeremy taught at Leicester University. In 1965 he published his first major academic work on the German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frige. He came to McGill University as an assistant professor in 1966. In 1969 he became an associate professor and a full professor in 1985. Although he spent the bulk of his academic career at McGill, he was also a visiting lecturer at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) in 1968 and a visiting lecturer at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal from 1971-1973. Walker taught courses chiefly on moral philosophy or meta-ethics, often including links to society, politics, and religion. He also taught political philosophy, including Marxian and post-Marxian theories, philosophy of literature with emphasis on Jane Austen, Dostoyevsky and children’s literature and the philosophy of psychology stressing the British School of Psychoanalysis. He took early retirement from McGill in 1992 but continued to live in Montreal thereafter. He was married to Catherine Hilliard (nee Forster) and Louise Leahy (nee Kohl) and had two children, Lucy Fisher and Adam Walker. He fell ill to cancer in 2004 and died in 2008.
This material was acquired from the Estate of Jeremy Walker shortly following his death through contacts via the literary executors.
The fonds contains chiefly the writings of Jeremy Walker on a variety of issues in moral philosophy and related literary topics. These writings, including anthologies, drafts of books and lecture notes, demonstrate the range of his eclectic interests from his formal studies of Kierkegaard and moral philosophy to his more personal intellectual pursuits concerning the literature of Kipling, Jane Austen, and Dostoyevsky, as well as the poetry of Woodsworth and reflections on Englishness. There are also examples of his published and unpublished poetry.
His more personal writings are in diaries that cover more than 20 years of his adult life and in contrast to his erudite writings on grand philosophical topics reflect his feelings and at times his dreams, on the state of his health, relationships with women, and recount the day-to-day events of urban travel and socializing.
His personal and family relationships are reflected by correspondence with family, friends and students, photo albums of travels to England and Greece, travel diaries document his summer activities from 1947 -1950, including lists of books read, drawings and photographs. As well, in a file titled Personalia (3) Apologiai Walker provides some personal chronologies, and reflects upon his writings and his life.
Material in English.
Open.