With sadness we learned of the death on Feb. 29, 2024, of Thomas R. Flynn, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Emory University. He was 87. Tom joined the Emory department in 1978, after study at the Gregorian University in Rome and at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D in 1970. Tom was an esteemed scholar and a beloved and gifted teacher. Known for his work on Sartre, on Existentialism and Marxism and on Michel Foucault, he contributed much to our understanding of French philosophy. Especially loved by his undergraduate students, Tom was blessed by a kind and compassionate manner and a delightful sense of humor.
Tom was a long-standing member of SPEP, where I met him many years before moving to Emory myself. He was also a Catholic priest, ordained in 1961, and he served a local congregation (St. John Chrysostom Melkite Catholic Church) throughout his years in Atlanta. Interestingly, this aspect of Tom’s life was little in evidence to his colleagues and students in philosophy. In my early years of knowing Tom, even staying at his house once on a visit to Atlanta before moving to Emory, I had no idea he was a priest. He never tried to hide it, of course, and I’ve no doubt that it figured at the deepest level as part of his identity as a person. But he chose not to make this part of his identity as an academic. And Sartre, Foucault and Marx were hardly Catholic philosophers.
Still, as mentor to younger faculty members, and as wise counsellor to his students, Tom’s compassion had a pastoral quality. Scholar, professor and priest were after all united in the same person.
Thomas Flynn’s major publications:
- Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago, 1986)
- Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason
· (Vol. 1): Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago, 1997)
· (Vol. 2): A Post-structuralist Mapping of History (Chicago, 2005) - Sartre: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge, 2014)
—David Carr
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Emory University