The recent death of Calvin O. Schrag at an advanced age is an unhappy milestone in the history of SPEP. The offspring of a Dakota Mennonite family with impressive intellectual credentials, Cal earned a Master’s degree at Yale Divinity before graduating with a Doctorate in philosophy from Harvard, where he famously served as teaching assistant to University Professor Paul Tillich (the source of many of Cal’s stories). Hired by Purdue in the early years of its philosophy program, he was central to its building a strong eclectic faculty and corresponding course offerings — with his special expertise in Continental European thought and his own open-ended and original metaphysical and phenomenological approach, as exemplified in his highly successful books and articles published over a span of decades, setting its tone. He was deeply involved, along with the late John Wild, James Edie, George Schrader, Richard Grabau, and several others, in the creation and evolution of SPEP, and he later served a three-year term as co-director.
At a personal level, Calvin Schrag was universally regarded as a congenial, highly empathetic human being with a lively wit and a great breadth of knowledge especially of the history of philosophy. He had a fine understanding of German, in part due to his family background, and he studied briefly with Heidegger as an exchange scholar. It was my good fortune to have made his acquaintance and to have been sponsored by him for a faculty position at Purdue, which I held for just over fifty years. Cal was himself an excellent university citizen – a chair of the University Senate, for example – and, although he retired at the then-conventional time, he continued to participate, until very near the end of his life, on Doctoral dissertation committees, in teaching an occasional special course, and in national professional activities. Only during his final months did he leave the Lafayette area permanently in order to settle into a residence near the Long Island home of his devoted daughter Heather.
—William McBride, Purdue University