Black’s forte was the essay, and most of his published books are collections of his essays. He was fascinated by puzzles of all kinds, and had a special talent for thinking up imaginative examples. He made contributions of importance to a wide range of subjects. These include his work on vagueness; on metaphor, which took him into literary criticism and the understanding of poetry; his contributions to the understanding of scientific method and of the nature of a definition of scientific method; the validation of inductive inference; Zeno’s and other paradoxes; the justification of logical axioms and the concept of justification itself.

Black conceived of his work early in his career as linguistic analysis. Forty years later he was speaking of conceptual clarification, which he dubbed ‘the articulation of concepts’. There was a change in name, but not much in style or method, and there was also a shift in interest to questions of rationality and reasonableness, conjoined with an attempt to work out the rudiments of a theory of practical reasoning and of the concept of humaneness. Throughout his career he provided incisive critical comment on the work of his bestknown contemporaries. On his own interests he said: There is work aplenty for semantic hygiene or the clarification of concepts.’

Although he ‘never…belonged to any philosophical school’, Black none the less confessed an affinity for the philosophy of common sense of Reid and Moore, if with certain demurrers and provisos. He confessed ‘to a strong belief that common-sense convictions…are more likely to be right than the skeptical objections of even the greatest philosophers’. He once said, The task of the moral philosopher is to solve the moral problems of his society’, and in the latter part of his career he was beginning to turn in this direction. One reviewer characterized him in this way: ‘a trenchant intellect and a flawless expository style’. All his life he was in search of clarity and more than once contemplated using that expression as the title of one of his collections. He did not, in the end, do so, but the phrase marks the character of the philosophical enterprise as he engaged in it. Another reviewer said: ‘Keen and sound criticism employing arguments which might be used by a philosopher of any school—if he had the acumen to marshal them and the literary skill thus to present them.’ This was said about his first collection of essays. It could be said about all of them.

Sources: Obituary notice, PAAPA, 64, 1991, pp. 61–2; WW(Am) 1984–5; WWW(Am) 1985–9; biographical data and bibliography supplied by Black in 1963–4; Profs W.H.Hay and F.L.Will; personal communication.