My teacher and friend Peter Long, who has died aged 93, was a pillar of the philosophy department at Leeds University for 30 years. His life’s work found expression in his book Logic, Form and Grammar, published by Routledge in 2001.
But this volume, groundbreaking and important as it was, gives only a partial impression of his personal style. Peter’s seminars on logical theory, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein remain with me after 50 years as shining examples of creative thinking. Never didactic, he did philosophy in front of his students and encouraged us to join in: but in such a way that flattering imitation was never an option.
Students who wanted something to write down and repeat got short shrift and rarely lasted. To be accepted as one worth talking to felt like an honour. Later, Peter was a loyal friend, though often irascible and frustrated by a philistine world.
One of twin brothers, Peter had come from a working-class family in Macclesfield, Cheshire, and took an enduring delight in membership of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. His father drove a hearse and his mother looked after the house. Peter left school at 14 and was apprenticed to a pharmacist, while also learning Latin and Greek at evening classes.
After national service in India, he went to University College London, where he studied philosophy under AJ Ayer, graduating with a first. After a year as a teaching assistant at UCL, he won a prize fellowship to Trinity College, Cambridge, studying and teaching there for three years before moving to Leeds. In 1979 he translated into English, with Roger White, Frege’s posthumous writings He remained at Leeds until his retirement in the early 1990s.
He was socially at his best in a domestic setting: sitting late into the night over a bottle of claret, listening to or talking about music, reciting poetry. His great passions were Mozart, Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poems of WB Yeats. He turned his painstakingly decorated house in Leeds, complete with Steinway piano, into a salon where his friends gathered to hear performances by established musicians, many of whom became Peter’s personal friends.
Peter never sought promotion or publicity. But to those who knew him he set a standard that keeps hope in the value of philosophy alive. His brother predeceased him.
