WILLIAM AUGUSTUS BANNER. Ph.D.
1999 "Excellence at Howard" Honoree
September 24, 1999

A TRIBUTE

by
Segun Gbadegesin, Ph.D.
Chair, Department of Philosophy
Howard University

On behalf of the students, faculty and staff of the Department of Philosophy, it is my honor to congratulate you, first on your 84^th birthday which came up last Saturday, and as everyone present here today will agree, these have been eighty-four years of dedication to family, community, nation and the life of reason. Your dedication to these institutions and ideal, and the consequence thereof for the well-being of your body and soul as evidenced in the youthfulness of your bodily appearance and the soundness of your mind at your age, is yet the strongest evidence of their relevance to our happiness as members of the species homo sapiens. Second, I congratulate you on this well-deserved honor, which recognizes your life-long pursuit, and achievement, of excellence in scholarship, teaching and service here at Howard University.

Perhaps more than any other arm of the university, we, in the department are in the best position to pronounce on those qualities which attest to your distinction as a scholar, teacher and servant leader. Having had a distinguished career as a student of philosophy at Harvard University, you started your career here at Howard University in the Department of Philosophy in 1945 (incidentally, that was the year of my birth). Your first major publication was Origen and the Tradition of Natural Law Concepts, which was published by Harvard University Press as part of Dumbarton Oaks Papers. Then in 1968, you published Ethics: an Introduction to Moral Philosophy, and in 1981 you published your critically acclaimed book on Moral Norms and Moral Order: The Philosophy of Human Affairs by the University Presses of Florida. This work is significant for the thesis that it advanced as well as the judicious use of argumentation in its support. In that book, consistent with your understanding of the universality of reason and your vision of the oneness of  knowledge, as theory and practice or as private and public, you argued for the commonality of questions of justice and legality and the need to avoid separating the two. The clarity of your argument and the reasonableness of your position were so transparent that the book attracted generous reviews and praises from such scholars as Henry Veatch of Georgetown University and George Schrader of Yale University. In his praise of the book, Veatch observed, among other things, that "in deft quotations and skilled summaries, Banner pits great thinkers one against another in arguments over the issues involved; and yet never in such a way as to allow himself or his readers to get bogged down in a lot of highly technical philosophical argument, which is so much the bane of present-day philosophizing. For this and for so much else in his book, Professor Banner is to be thanked and congratulated." (University Presses of Florida Release on Moral Norms and Moral Order) Similarly, George Schrader of Yale has this to say: "Banner is always lucid and reasonable. As he states the case for normative legal theory, it is quite persuasive…He has applied a historical critical method with great effectiveness and has given new freshness to a perennial issue." (University Presses of Florida Release on Moral Norms and Moral Order). Now, philosophers are not the kindest critics of each other, and these reviews show that you are taken seriously by the community of scholars to which you have contributed so much.

But what impressed me most, and what I think is the legacy you are leaving for those of your younger colleagues, is the fact that you refuse to quit! For is it not true that many years after your official retirement from active service, you have continued to publish path-breaking works, and to make stimulating presentations to the academic community? In 1996, you published The Path of St. Augustine (Rowman and Littlefield). This should be a reminder and a great lesson to those scholars who choose a life of intellectual atrophy and degeneration after tenure. For you have shown us that the life of reason does not retire, and that the active pursuit of excellence must be a life time commitment. For this, we are grateful.

Your teaching record reminds us of the joy of this noble profession. Your mark of excellence is written legibly on the Masters theses of your students. As I flip through theses on the departmental shelf, your name comes up in almost all those written during your time here. From Matthew T. Adom's "The Mind-body Problem in the Philosophy of Aristotle" to Bruce Jack Freshman's "Naturalistic Ethical Absolutism"; from John Ebo Okoiti's "The Empiricism of George Berkely and the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God" to Joseph Andoh Quarm's "The Nzema Concepts of God, Man and Society", and a host of others, you saw them all through with rigor and they all express their sincere appreciation of your guidance and direction. Many of them have fun memories of the department, thanks to your effective mentoring. Joseph Quarm joined us at the first Alain Locke conference last year from New York where he is a senior official of the school system.  He has nothing but praise for you and the department. Like the Alain Locke lecture, which you established as chair, Alain Locke Conference is now an annual event, and with it is the commitment to establish an endowed chair in the name of Alain Locke. We are collaborating actively with the American Philosophical Association's Committee on Blacks in Philosophy; all of them attended the last two conferences and they all shared and appropriated our vision for the department. They see their attendance and participation in our conferences as a "homecoming" to the ancestry home of " Philosophy Born of Struggle" and "Philosophy in Support of Struggle." You were one of the pioneers of this tradition of philosophy as exemplified in your 1977 paper on "Compensatory Justice and the Meaning of Equity" in which you affirmed among others, that "compensatory justice calls for a new allotment of the resources of a society which has tolerated an unequal extension of opportunity and an unequal distribution of the rewards of labor." (in Social Justice and Preferential Treatment: Women and Racial Minorities in Education and Business edited by William Blackstone and Robert D. Heslep, Athens: The University of Georgia Press) p.208).

The department continues to strive to walk the path of excellence, which you have so diligently cleared and walked, and to make a distinctive contribution to the life of reason. It is gratifying to note therefore that you have also affirmed today the "universality of philosophy or philosophizing as a human enterprise and the significance of this universality for the advancement of inquiry and the unity of humankind.  (Philosophy and the Household of Reason, p.1). We believe that we have a duty to pursue this concept of the universality of philosophizing by opening up to philosophy those worlds that appear to have been inadvertently closed up to it. For we cannot live with partial truth; if philosophy is the pursuit of truth it must pursue the whole truth by bringing all perspectives to the table. Many thanks to you for affirming this to us. What we must then be aware of is the importance of rigor and excellence. Our philosophizing must be marked by a strict adherence to the requirements of logic and reason; and must satisfy the demands of integrity in research and respect for the dignity of persons. You have been a vanguard of this approach to scholarship, and so, as the saying goes, "you've been there, done that too."

We thank you and we appreciate you. CONGRATULATIONS!