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