SIVACRACY.NET

Once a month or so, Robert Solomon and his friend James Pennebaker
would meet for beer and conversation at a Guadalupe Street watering
hole, the Dog & Duck. Most of the time, Solomon, a philosophy
professor at the University of Texas, and Pennebaker, a UT psychology
professor, would talk about what people usually talk about at bars:
"The nature of emotions, from both a philosophical and a
neuroscientific perspective," Pennebaker recalled Thursday.

Beer and neuroscience — they could almost be the watchwords of a
life that Solomon's friends and colleagues say was marked by a
passion for intellectual seriousness and a love of fun. One former
student, the filmmaker Richard Linklater, cast him in a cameo role as
himself in the 2001 film "Waking Life."

Solomon's own life ended suddenly this week in Switzerland. Solomon,
64, an internationally known scholar who had taught at UT since 1972,
died Tuesday morning in the Zurich, Switzerland, airport. According
to his wife, Kathleen Higgins, also a philosophy professor at UT,
Swiss medical authorities cited the cause of death as pulmonary
hypertension.

She and Solomon were on their way from Austin to Rome to visit his
brother Jon, a classics professor at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign who was leading a group of students on a tour of
Roman ruins.

"We had gotten off a flight and were in the process of trying to
figure out where we needed to go for our connecting flight," Higgins
said by phone from Zurich, where she was making arrangements to bring
Solomon's body back to America. "He said he was dizzy and collapsed."

Solomon received medical attention immediately but was dead within
minutes. Higgins said her husband had a congenital heart defect —
"basically, a hole in the heart" — that gave him trouble throughout
his life.

As Solomon told the American-Statesman in 2005, he arrived in Austin
35 years ago on something of a lark.

"I was young and adventuresome, I guess, so I took lots of one-year
jobs and two-year jobs just because I wanted to see the world,"
Solomon said. "I came to Texas expecting it was an interesting place
and I'd spend a couple semesters here and then go back to New York."
Instead, he fell in love with the town and stayed.

During his decades at UT, Solomon developed expertise in at least
three scholarly areas: existentialism, the role of the emotions, and
business ethics. His interest in existentialism began as a young man
and continued well past the era when most philosophers took the topic
seriously. Solomon believed that the existentialists — most notably,
Sartre, Camus and Nietzsche (whom he considered an early
existentialist) — addressed fundamental questions of life that much
of modern philosophy had left behind.

His interest in emotions, by contrast, predated the current vogue for
such studies; when he first started contemplating the philosophy of
emotions, few philosophers were interested in the topic. Now, there
are academic conferences virtually every week.

"His work on emotions was at the cutting edge," said David Sosa,
chairman of UT's philosophy department.

And Solomon's interest in business ethics brought him into the real
world in a way that few philosophers dare: He worked as a paid
consultant for corporate executives on ethical issues. By his own
admission, he learned as much as he taught.

All three fields point toward Solomon's insistence that philosophy
must engage with the age-old issues and questions that puzzle
undergraduates and public leaders alike: "Why are we here? What is
the good? How do I live?"

This passion made Solomon a much-loved teacher — his former students
spoke of him glowingly, and he was featured in several "Superstar
Teacher" video courses for the Teaching Company.

"I think his vitality impressed everybody," Higgins said. "Making
thinking be an important part of life and something that added to
life's splendor and mystery was really a model for a lot of people
and captivated many, many students."

"He was one of those people who took his own life and life in general
very seriously, and yet he had a whole lot of fun," said LBJ Library
director Betty Sue Flowers, a longtime friend of Solomon's. "He died
too young, but I bet he packed many lifetimes into the time he had."

Solomon is survived by his wife; two brothers, H. Andrew Solomon of
Austin and Jon Solomon of Urbana, Ill.; and five nieces and nephews.

There will be a private memorial service later this month; the
philosophy department is planning a conference in Solomon's honor in
the fall.