Today, December 2, 2021, is two years since Professor Kenneth A. Taylor’s untimely passing. Students at Stanford and in philosophy everywhere miss his bracing love of life, humanity, and freedom. We miss his on-fire energetic teaching, booming voice, spontaneous improv antics. Most of all, his supremely fair generosity of spirit toward ideas and language from a diversity of perspectives.
A longtime, eloquent critic of racism and an inspirational voice for inclusion, Ken Taylor urged students to “play the believing game” when reading, asking them to first try to reconstruct the writer’s argument before questioning their premises. Such efforts, while arduous and often irritating to students with off-putting, jargon-filled texts like Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity or seemingly dated, elite, colonialist-sympathizing war horses like J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, allowed students to grasp important ideas and consider their value first when building their own critical arguments. Close reading was paramount, and with it Ken Taylor demanded students refuse to elide the flaws of beloved thinkers’ work. He urged us to closely interrogate the social conditions of Black “shiftlessness” as well as the antisemitic remarks in W.E.B DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Ken Taylor was tough, fair, and thorough. He had no patience for simplistic narratives about the causes of social domination and offered no easy solutions. He longed for the America that DuBois envisioned but never saw, that Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped to hold to its “promissory note.” Every day we work toward his vision under his fearless aegis.
Students made these stickers and t-shirts originally in 2015, and today you’ll still see them around the Stanford campus as invitations to discuss and to think for oneself, sapere aude!