Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard: The Husserl Scholar Evangelicals Called Their C.S. Lewis

For forty-seven years he taught logic and metaphysics at a secular research university in Los Angeles, translated Edmund Husserl out of German, and published more than two hundred articles in academic philosophy. In the other half of his life he wrote books about prayer that sold in the hundreds of thousands and reshaped how a generation of American Protestants thought about spiritual practice. Dallas Willard did not treat these as two careers. USC's dean of religious life, Varun Soni, called him "the ultimate scholar-practitioner," a man who "bridged the divide between philosophy and theology."

Missouri

Dallas Albert Willard was born on 4 September 1935 in Buffalo, Missouri. His mother died when he was two. His route through higher education was the long one available to a poor Southern Baptist boy in the 1950s: a B.A. in psychology from Tennessee Temple College in 1956, then a B.A. in philosophy and religion from Baylor in 1957, then graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he completed a doctorate in philosophy in 1964 with a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology.

He joined the University of Southern California in 1965 and never left. He directed USC's School of Philosophy from 1982 to 1985 and held a Dornsife Faculty Fellowship.

The Day Job

The academic work was serious and specialised. Willard was widely recognised as an authority on Husserl, particularly on time-consciousness and intentionality, and he translated two of Husserl's books into English: *Early Writings in the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics* in 1993 and the *Philosophy of Arithmetic* in 2003. His own monograph, *Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge*, appeared in 1984 and was reviewed in the major philosophical journals. He wrote across metaphysics, ethics, phenomenology and the history of philosophy — over two hundred published articles and twenty-two forewords. Late in life he was at work on *The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge*, an examination of how the twentieth-century university stopped treating morality as something that could be known.

He was also, by every internal account, an extraordinary teacher. Scott Soames, USC's Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, called him "a pillar of our undergraduate program" and "for many years, the teacher with the greatest range" — logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion. He chaired thirty-one successful doctoral dissertations and routinely taught course overloads. Two courses he designed, "Reasoning and Logic" and "The Professions and the Public Interest in American Life," became cornerstones of USC's philosophy, politics and law major. He won the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Blue Key award in 1976, and the Student Senate Award for Outstanding Faculty in 1984.

The Other Work

Willard was a committed Christian who wrote and lectured extensively on spirituality — in the words of USC's Donald Miller, "a very different topic from his specialized research on the philosopher Edmund Husserl." *The Spirit of the Disciplines* appeared in 1988, arguing that the practices of the Christian tradition — solitude, fasting, silence, study — were not devotional decoration but the actual mechanism by which a person's character changes. *The Divine Conspiracy* followed in 1998 and was named Christianity Today's Book of the Year for 1999. *Renovation of the Heart*, in 2002, won the same magazine's Spirituality Award the following year.

The argument running through all of it was compressed by his family into a single phrase after his death: that each person is "an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God's great universe." He influenced Richard Foster, J.P. Moreland and a wide circle of pastors and writers, and among evangelical readers he was, as Miller noted, "sometime referred to... as a contemporary C.S. Lewis."

Death

He announced publicly that he had stage four cancer. He died days later, on 8 May 2013, at Kaiser Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, aged 77. He was survived by his wife Jane Lakes Willard, whom he married in 1955, his son John, his daughter Becky Heatley, and a granddaughter.

Why Dallas Is Called a Genius

The distinctive capacity was range held together under a single method, and his colleagues named it precisely. Soames described him as the teacher with the greatest range the department had known, covering nearly the whole philosophical curriculum at a level that produced thirty-one doctorates. Miller reported students leaving his classes "in awe of his wide-ranging knowledge of the history of philosophy and ethics." What made this more than encyclopedism was that the technical and devotional work ran on the same engine. Husserl's project was the description of experience with maximum precision, refusing to reduce what appears to consciousness; Willard's spiritual writing does the same thing to prayer, temptation and habit — treating the interior life as a domain with real structure that can be described accurately and acted on reliably. *The Spirit of the Disciplines* is essentially a phenomenologist's account of character formation, which is why it reads unlike anything else in its genre.

The counter-case is straightforward. His popular reputation vastly exceeds his standing in academic philosophy: *Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge* was respectfully reviewed but did not redirect the field, and outside Husserl scholarship he is not a name that changes arguments. The bulk of his output was translation, exposition and teaching rather than original system-building, and *The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge* was unfinished at his death. The "contemporary C.S. Lewis" comparison is affectionate rather than analytic, and Lewis himself was a literary scholar whose philosophy was amateur. The fairest reading is that Willard was a first-rate scholar and a genuinely exceptional teacher whose originality lay in application — taking a rigorous continental method into territory where almost nobody had thought to bring it — rather than in advancing philosophy itself.

Legacy

The two audiences that barely overlapped in his lifetime have both kept him. USC's philosophy school remembers a colleague Soames called "one of the most popular, versatile and dedicated teachers the School of Philosophy has ever known"; the Dallas Willard Center for Spiritual Formation at Westmont College carries his name into the world of Christian practice, and several other institutions do the same. His Husserl translations remain the standard English editions of those texts, which means that anyone reading the *Philosophy of Arithmetic* in English is reading Willard. That is a durable form of survival, and an unusual one for a man better known for a book about the Sermon on the Mount.

Achievements

• Held posts at University of Southern California and University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Fields: Edmund Husserl