Steven Davis, a former faculty member in the Philosophy department at Carleton University, passed away in Montreal on February 28th, 2025. He was in his late 80s, and is survived by his wife, Lysiane Gagnon, longtime columnist for La Presse and the Globe and Mail.
Steven had a long and distinguished academic career, teaching at the University of Pittsburgh (1966-74), Simon Fraser University (1974-2002), and finally at Carleton University (2002-2007). He was also an adjunct professor at McGill and the UofM and a Research Associate of the Jean-Nicod Institute, Paris. In 2018, Carleton awarded him an honourary LLD.
Steven’s specialisations in philosophy were in lexical semantics, cognition, and ethics. At SFU, Steven founded their Cognitive Science Programme, one of the first in Canada, which among other things published the still-influential Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science. In that period, Steven served as journal editor, programme chair, and finally as President of the Canadian Philosophical Association. He retired from SFU in 2002, but was not ready to retire altogether, and so he joined the faculty at Carleton. Here, among other things, Steven served as the first Director of the Centre on Values and Ethics.
When Steven left the academy in 2007, he founded Academics without Borders, which he headed until 2017. AWB connects volunteer academics, mostly Canadian, to universities and research institutes in the global South, mostly in Africa. Building AWB was the high point of a long and successful career.
Steven Davis’s philosophical interests were wide-ranging; his academic career was long and impactful; his philosophical work and mentorship inspired many young philosophers and academics. He will be missed.
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