It is with great sadness that the AAP notes the passing of the former philosopher and friend of the AAP, Lloyd Reinhardt. Lloyd taught at the University of Sydney for many years (as well as Keele University, Birkbeck College, the University of London and the University of California, Santa Barbara). He was a senior lecturer in philosophy at Sydney from 1979 until his retirement in 2001, and published several important articles in the philosophy of language, aesthetics and metaphysics.
Lloyd was born in Deer Creek Minnesota, USA in 1933. After completing his army service, stationed in Germany, he returned to the USA to study philosophy at Berkeley. While there, he studied with Stanley Cavell, Paul Grice and John Searle. Lloyd, like many others of that generation, does not hold a PhD in philosophy. But he went on to complete the prestigious BPhil at Oxford under Gilbert Ryle, during which time he came in regular contact with J.L Austin as well.
Lloyd was a big-hearted man with an unforgettable bass baritone voice and a strong appetite for jokes, good food and wine and, above all, philosophy. Lloyd was an enthusiastic philosophical conversationalist and there are a many of us in the Australasian Philosophical community who owe him a great debt, having benefitted enormously from his generosity in giving up his time to talk philosophy with a seriousness and passion second to none.
Lloyd’s wife Janet writes: “Lloyd never lost his love of philosophy. On the day before he died he was reading Jonathon Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.”