Remembering Joseph
Joseph Raz (1939-2022)
Joseph Raz was my closest friend for 25 years, up until the day he died – perhaps even afterwards. What initially brought us together was our common interest in philosophy, leading to countless conversations, years of teaching together, and ultimately a book of his latest essays that I edited. But philosophy wasn't the only connection we shared. As fellow immigrants to the UK, we both experienced a sense of homelessness and of an unplanned journey, arriving somewhere almost by accident.
Joseph is known for his many contributions to legal, moral, and political philosophy. His ability to shape a whole range of philosophical questions in a lasting way was one of a kind. It will continue to lead the discipline for some time to come. The breadth of his philosophical interests was even greater. In a last meeting we had before he was taken to hospital for his final days, we went to a café we’d been to numerous times – beginning with the pandemic when they had outside seating and seemed a safe and friendly spot. Joseph told me that he had spent the morning reading Tim Williamson’s review of Kit Fine’s book on vagueness. ‘I bet you haven’t read that yet.’ Touché. ‘You must read more widely’, he told me not for the first time, kindly filling me in on Williamson’s piece.
Beyond philosophy, Joseph was an astute political commentator on many topics – obviously on the politics of the Middle East, his one-time home, whose history and political turns he was better informed on than anyone I’ve known. Of the many ways in which I miss him, not being able to talk with him about the current political situation is not the least.
When I experienced workplace mobbing years ago (at an institution very different from my current one), I saw a side of Joseph I came to deeply admire. He taught me the expression "we must put the fear of God into them." He was a fighter—not fearless, if fearlessness means not to be worried or being unconcerned about failure. On the contrary, Joseph was a worrier supreme. Yet I repeatedly watched him stand up against injustices both small and large, challenging institutions and decision makers, and writing public letters—typically not joining existing movements but initiating his own battles. Here is an example: letter to Tsinghua University president.
Though often socially shy and awkward, Joseph was a sharp and frequently funny interlocutor. He loved jokes, even though his telling and ruining them usually amounted to the same thing. The Joseph approach to storytelling featured a strong beginning before veering into what he considered important background information, which inevitably led to further missing items that needed filling in. The odds of reaching the punchline were slim. However, he was a master of quick, witty rejoinders. "Joseph, do you think that the end justifies the means?" "Well, nothing else does."
Early in our friendship, I came to share Joseph's passion for photography. During a time when we were both based in New York, he took me on photography walks and to exhibitions, introducing me not only to his favourite photographers—great Americans like Steichen, Adams, White, and Siskind—but also to Salgado, Mann, Koudelka, Nixon, Sherman, Arbus, Lange, Cameron to name but a few. Here too, he believed in exploring it all as best one can. He gave me one of his old cameras, a digital SLR of considerable weight (I mean this literally), and tried to teach me how to use it. This may have been a frustrating undertaking for him, since he believed in understanding how the camera works before using it, whereas I am, when it comes to machines like that, a trial-and-error person. I learned a few things via ‘theory’, but for the most part, I dabbled. When a friend asked me to take photos at a dance performance she had choreographed – after all, I now had a good camera – and I soon realized that the lighting conditions didn’t work well with what I was trying to do, I emergency-called Joseph. "What should I do?" "You have heard about changing the ISO?" Hmm. Now I have.
We put together Joseph’s last book during the last year of his life. He had several unpublished papers but didn’t have the energy anymore to bring them together as a book (as he had done several times in the past). We planned the volume around topics which had been close to Joseph’s heart throughout his career: explaining normativity by focusing on reasons, working through some complexities like the role of normative powers which seem to sit badly with the general value-based view of practical reasons that Joseph had developed, and exploring the role of social practices in understanding value and normativity. All of these have been perennial topics of Joseph’s philosophy from the very beginning – e.g., in his writings on legal philosophy which led to introducing his accounts of normative powers and exclusionary reasons, or in his earlier attempt to explain how social practices can ground values and normative reasons without undermining their claim to objectivity in The Practice of Value. We decided not to include writings on legal and political philosophy in the book. There are some unpublished papers in these areas still. There are also a couple of papers on reasons which I wish we had included. I don’t recall how it happened that they were left behind.
Even now, almost three years after his death, I miss Joseph more often and in more ways than I can relate. Not being treated to his surprising, unexpected thoughts, and his clever insightful observations has left the biggest hole. Commenting on Proust's reflections on grief, my colleague Tom Stern writes: "It is Proust's view both that the loved one is incorporated into many or all of our daily activities and that, loving them, we do not and in fact cannot notice this enmeshing until they are gone." Indeed—if the unexpected can become a habitual part of one's life.
April 2025