This post appeared on my previous blog (now defunct) 10 years ago. It's a tribute to Gary Banham, who died suddenly on March 7, 2013.
Yesterday, I was informed of the tragic death of my dear friend and colleague Gary Banham. He was celebrating 25 years together with his partner Don in Rome, when his life was cruelly taken as a result of what appears to be a stroke. I'm very upset by this and feel for Don.
I got to know Gary as the external examiner of my PhD at Warwick University in January 2004. We later collaborated on the editing of the massive work that was The Continuum Companion to Kant, and in 2010 he started the electronic journal Kant Studies Online, whose importance for Kant scholarship is increasing, and I hope that as managing director Don will be able to carry on with Gary's work.
Although due to the fact that we lived in different cities (and since last year in different countries) we didn't see each other much lately, we always kept in touch via email. The last time I saw Gary in person was together with my good friend Christian Onof (Gary is on the left in above picture, Christian on the right) at the meeting of the UKKS in St Andrews in September 2011, when the three of us had a truly great evening at the spectacularly located Seafood Restaurant at Bruce Embankment.
Gary was one of the best: kind, thoughtful in every respect, a good laugh, a great thinker, and a lover of the arts, and above all a seriously committed Kantian. At the time of his death, he was working on what would have become his 4th monograph, on Kant's moral philosophy. It's a shame that he wasn't allowed to finish it.
Gary leaves behind a huge body of work, among which 3 books on Kant: Kant and the End of Aesthetics (Macmillan 2000), Kant's Practical Philosophy (Palgrave 2003, 2006 [pb]) and Kant's Transcendental Imagination (Palgrave 2006). He also wrote intensively (see here) on Kantian moral and political philosophy, and perhaps someone with expertise in this area could edit this material into some publishable format.
RIP
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