CUMMING, Robert (Denoon) 1916-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 27, 1916, in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada; died August 25, 2004, in New York, NY. Educator and author. Cumming was a former philosophy professor at Columbia University. While Cumming studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, World War II interrupted his education, and he went to fight in Europe as a liaison to the Free French Army. He was part of the forces that helped liberate Paris, and received the Legion of Merit and the Croix de Guerre for his brave service. With the war over, Cumming returned to school, this time at the Sorbonne and then the University of Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1950. Already an instructor at Columbia since 1948, he remained there for the rest of career, chairing the philosophy department from 1961 to 1964 and retiring as Frederick J. E. Woodbridge professor emeritus in 1985. Cumming was a Plato scholar, whose works he translated, as well as editor of Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1965). The author of Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought (1969) and Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence (1979), Cumming completed a four-volume master work on the phenomenological movement, which includes Phenomenology and Deconstruction: The Dream Is Over (1991), Method and Imagination (1992), Solitude (2001), and Breakdown in Communication (2002).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 7, 2004, section 3, p. 4.

Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2004, p. B11.

New York Times, September 6, 2004, p. A17.

Washington Post, September 7, 2004, p. B6.