Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

WOLFE MAYS (1940) was an eminent philosopher with a long and
distinguished career spanning almost six decades. By the end of his life, he
was probably the last philosopher alive to have known both Collingwood and
Wittgenstein. His younger colleagues found him to be an apparently
inexhaustible source of philosophical lore; there seemed to be no one of note
that Wolfe had not known, taught or been taught by, or disagreed with.
Wolfe came to King’s as a graduate student, where he wrote his PhD thesis on
the philosophy of A N Whitehead. Once this was completed in 1944, he
moved for a year to the University of Edinburgh where he was Assistant
Lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics, and then moved to take up a post in the
Philosophy Department at the University of Manchester, where he was to
remain until his retirement in 1979.
Wolfe despised Oxford-style analytical philosophy, being more of a
Continentalist and a historian of science. He was particularly fascinated with
the whole question of thinking and learning, exploring how we move from a
state of not knowing to a state of understanding. His contact with Alan Turing
helped to develop his interest in models of human mental functions, and this
led him to work with the team Jean Piaget had established in Geneva studying
the acquisition of logical and mathematical concepts by young children; many
important publications came out of this fruitful partnership.
Perhaps because of his repeated visits to the Continent to work with Piaget,
Wolfe became interested in phenomenology and existentialism, an interest
that influenced his lecturing. In 1970, he founded the British Society for
Phenomenology, and was a very active editor of its journal until the time of
his death on 21 January 2005.
Wolfe loved university life and took part in all aspects of it with great energy.
He was an active member of the AUT and served on the National Executive
and as President of the Manchester University branch. He unfailingly attended
departmental research seminars and could always find something to say after
the delivery of a paper, saving his colleagues sometimes from potentially
embarrassing silences. He liked teaching and was skilful at adapting his style
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OBITUARIES