Download PDF - St. Catherine's College - University of Oxford
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GAZETTE<br />
Frank Ci<strong>of</strong>fi’s background differed from that<br />
<strong>of</strong> his privileged <strong>Oxford</strong> contemporaries. He<br />
was born in New York in 1928 to a poor Italian<br />
family. His mother perished in childbirth and<br />
his father died soon afterwards. He was raised<br />
by his grandparents as a son, but even after<br />
he learned his actual parentage he considered<br />
his revered uncle Lou to be his brother. After<br />
he dropped out <strong>of</strong> a terrible high school, he<br />
began his real education in the streets and<br />
clubs <strong>of</strong> wartime Manhattan, where he met<br />
writers such as James Baldwin, and in the New<br />
York Public Library, where he immersed himself<br />
in all kinds <strong>of</strong> reading. He also enjoyed the<br />
delights <strong>of</strong> American popular culture: baseball,<br />
radio, films and pulp fiction. He served with<br />
the American army <strong>of</strong> occupation in Japan<br />
and with the war graves registration service<br />
in France, and while living in Paris he was<br />
encouraged by his friend Lionel Blue to apply<br />
to <strong>Oxford</strong>, where he studied first at Ruskin<br />
<strong>College</strong> and then at Catz, all financed by the<br />
GI Bill <strong>of</strong> Rights. He was tutored by Friedrich<br />
Waismann and Anthony Quinton and, for a<br />
term, by Iris Murdoch.<br />
After two years <strong>of</strong> research in Social<br />
Psychology, he took up a Lectureship in<br />
Philosophy at the <strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> Singapore,<br />
where he met and married Nalini Nair.<br />
Through Nalini, he was brother-in-law to the<br />
Singapore trade union leader Devan Nair,<br />
who subsequently served as President <strong>of</strong><br />
Singapore, and later to the poet and lyricist<br />
Sydney Carter. When foreigners were forced to<br />
resign from the university, he left Singapore<br />
for a Senior Lectureship in Philosophy at the<br />
<strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> Kent, where he formed many<br />
lasting friendships, especially with the literary<br />
scholars Edward Greenwood and David Ellis,<br />
both <strong>of</strong> whom dedicated books to him. While<br />
at Kent, he paid stimulating academic visits to<br />
the Philosophy Department at <strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong><br />
California, Berkeley.<br />
In 1973, Ci<strong>of</strong>fi became the founding Pr<strong>of</strong>essor<br />
<strong>of</strong> Philosophy at the <strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> Essex. His<br />
own contributions were ground-breaking<br />
courses in Philosophy <strong>of</strong> Psychopathology and<br />
Philosophy, Literature and Literary Criticism<br />
as well as first year lectures that persuaded<br />
many students initially aiming at other studies<br />
to pursue philosophy for their degrees. As<br />
unlikely as it was in that period, colleagues<br />
with radically different orientations talked<br />
and learned from one another. After two<br />
decades at Essex, Ci<strong>of</strong>fi retired to a Research<br />
Pr<strong>of</strong>essorship at Kent and returned with Nalini<br />
to their well-loved family home in Canterbury.<br />
Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences,<br />
(CUP, 1970), which he co-edited with Robert<br />
Borger, influenced the development <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Philosophy <strong>of</strong> Social Science. Many <strong>of</strong> his<br />
papers were collected in Wittgenstein on<br />
Freud and Frazer (CUP, 1998) and Freud<br />
and the Question <strong>of</strong> Pseudo-Science (Open<br />
Court, 1998). At his death, he was working<br />
on a volume <strong>of</strong> new or previously uncollected<br />
papers. He is survived by his wife Nalini and<br />
his step-grandson Luke Schooling-Parker.<br />
Frank Ci<strong>of</strong>fi’s tall, lean figure, his bearded<br />
face, his intense mind and brilliant<br />
conversation will be remembered at both Kent<br />
and Essex. For many colleagues and students<br />
he exemplified what it is to live the life <strong>of</strong> a<br />
philosopher.<br />
Nicholas Bunnin<br />
ALAN THOMAS EVANS TREHERNE (1953,<br />
Theology) was born in Natyglo, South<br />
Wales on 18 June 1930. He attended Hafod<br />
Y Grammar School in Natyglo, studied for his<br />
BA at <strong>St</strong> David’s Lampeter, and undertook his<br />
theological training at Catz. During holidays<br />
he supplemented his grant by working on the<br />
production line at Bulmer’s Cider in Hereford.<br />
He and another student were made quality<br />
controllers who spent an hour on and an <strong>of</strong>f<br />
measuring the cider for impurities. They had<br />
no expertise in the task but were appointed<br />
because they were the only two teetotalers –<br />
the rest <strong>of</strong> the Brynmawr crew always ended<br />
the day the worse for wear as there was no<br />
restriction on the sampling <strong>of</strong> the produce!<br />
Alan did his National Service in Egypt and<br />
Libya where he worked as a radiographer. He<br />
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