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In Memoriam: Judy Wubnig (1934 – 2017)

September 2018

Judy Wubnig took a position at the University of Waterloo’s philosophy department in 1965 and remained there all her academic life, retiring in 2002. Her BA, which she earned in 1955, was from Swarthmore and her MA and PhD were from Yale. Judy was a Kant scholar and a philosopher of politics.

She died in the spring of 2017, in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.

During her lengthy tenure in the department, she “…was never shy about speaking up in defence of what she thought was right, and regarded herself as a staunch advocate of free speech” (quoting from her obituary note in the department’s website).

Judy was a founding member of SAFS. She never missed the annual meeting, and could be relied on to contribute to discussion, as indeed she also did at departmental colloquia, which she rarely missed. She always had the reputation as a sort of maverick, but if she was a “character”, she was regarded as a rather admirable one. We could all use a goodly spark of her determination to support the freedom not only of scholars but of people generally.