Bob Meyer just has died, of a heart attack after a year-long battle with cancer. Bob was a long-time member of the Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Sciences here at ANU, and even after he moved across the university and then retired, was a ubiquitous presence here. He was a larger-than-life character who was enormous fun to be around.
Bob was well-known for his work on nonclassical logic, especially relevance logic (or as Bob always insisted, relevant logic). He was also famous as Maximum Leader of the Logicians Liberation League, whose manifesto (presented at Indiana University in 1969 complete with a cream pie attack) ends as follows:
Beware you snakes of the Philosophical Power Structure, which you have created and which you maintain to put down the logician; you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system, with exact formation rules, a recursive set of axioms, and clear and cogent rules of inference, and you have made them your pigeons. Oh, you filterable viruses, we will shake you off and fly once more.
Bob was author of one of my all-time favorite philosophy articles (which I read in graduate school long before knowing him), "God Exists!", published in Nous in 1987. This article demonstrates that the existence of God is equivalent to the axiom of choice. One direction is easy (just let God do the choosing), while the other direction requires a bit more work, applying Zorn's lemma to infinite causal chains.
Bob's cancer was said to have a 97% fatality rate, but he had high hopes for being in the 3%. He wrote to me a while back: "I do remain (stupidly?) cheerful--after all, I worried for years that all that smoking would lead to cancer. I don't have that worry any more." I'll remember him coming to a party last year as Wonko the Sane (pictured here with his wife Bobi, daughter Dorothy, and me; here are some more photos of Bob), the character from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who took his house to be the only pocket of sanity and the rest of the world to be the Asylum. That captures something of the Bob Meyer worldview. His many quirks were grounded in an enormously warm humanity. We'll miss him.
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