Walker, Jeremy D. B.

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.

Walker viewed himself first and foremost as a mentor, seeking to encourage students to reflect upon their lives. He valued quite highly the personal contact with students, both in formal classroom and in informal settings. He published three books on the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard as well as many articles and book reviews. He was also a published poet. After his retirement from McGill, he continued to work on a variety of projects and produced a number of unpublished manuscripts.