In 1968, when Ralph McInerny drove David and Mary Lou Solomon from the airport to campus for the first time, the young philosopher from Walnut Springs, Texas, was entering an alien world. Solomon had grown up attending the local Baptist church, thinking of becoming a preacher. But as an undergraduate at Baylor University, he took up philosophy, then went on to graduate school at the University of Texas. So, it was as a Texas Baptist with a well-trained skepticism toward things Catholic that Solomon encountered dorm Masses, statues in the bushes, relics in the church and the Mother of God overlooking it all from atop the Dome. No matter. He had come to Notre Dame for philosophy, not Catholicism, little realizing that one would lead to the other.
The Department of Philosophy was then in transition. The chair, with Father Ted Hesburgh’s presidential blessing, had set out to turn its nearly monolithic neo-scholastic ethos into a more pluralistic one by bringing in a cohort of younger philosophers trained in various approaches. Solomon’s expertise was anglophone philosophical ethics.
It was a field dominated by the familiar but facile claim that moral beliefs are not matters of fact but rather values based on personal preference and mere opinion — a position called emotivism. But a group of British philosophers led by Elizabeth Anscombe dissented from this view, arguing that morality is embedded in ordinary language and intentional actions that, when analyzed carefully and reasonably, lead to a conception of human nature and the virtues and vices that enable or inhibit human flourishing. At length, this approach was set forth in 1981 by the late Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, a comprehensive critique of modern philosophy and compelling retrieval of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues that marked the revival of so-called virtue ethics.
Solomon’s contribution was to argue that virtue ethics entailed a “radical” reconfiguration of ethical reflection in keeping with the ancient pursuit of the good life. He pressed this point in departmental colloquia, conferences and journals, taught it in classes and seminars. On the graduate level, his teaching in Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy and in Medical Ethics was so compelling that he ended up directing 36 doctoral dissertations, a department record. To undergrads, he taught his famous Morality and Modernity, which featured After Virtue, amplified by Solomon’s arguments, everyday examples and cultural commentary peppered with his inimitable wit and humor. He taught the course as a supersection: 400-plus students and eight teaching assistants. “Launching this course is like launching D-Day,” he would say. But the effort was worth it if students left the class maladjusted to modern, individual, bureaucratic culture and with an eye to attain genuine virtue, friendship and community.
Solomon by turns directed undergraduate studies in philosophy, the Arts and Letters Honors Program and the London Program, and organized an annual medical ethics conference. And he did it all with what his colleague Ken Sayre called “contagious affability.”
His signature achievement was founding what is now the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. When Baylor enticed him to start an ethics center there, Notre Dame’s then-provost, Nathan Hatch, urged him to create one here instead. Within weeks, he summoned a team to hash out its goal of articulating the moral and intellectual vision Pope John Paul II laid out in his “three great encyclicals”: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae and Fides et Ratio. A host of activities ensued: speaking events, work-study support for undergraduates, summer workshops in pro-life thought and action, and a celebrated annual conference.
The “Fall Conference” drew hundreds to campus on a nonfootball weekend. Prominent scholars gave plenary lectures. Scores of faculty and graduate students from around the country delivered papers and sat on panels. The ethos was scholarly, open to folks on all scholarly levels or none, and unabashedly Catholic, with an opening Mass and Dominican nuns strolling about with oversized rosaries hanging from their habits. In the evenings, folks crowded into Murf’s at the Morris Inn. The conference concluded with a Saturday banquet, Solomon offering after-dinner remarks featuring stories, one-liners aimed at various attendees and an inspiring send-off. The Solomons would host out-of-towners at an afterparty.
Some on campus were wary of the conference’s conservative vibe. Many were more than annoyed when Solomon led a protest of President Obama’s receiving an honorary degree at commencement in 2009. But amid the static, Solomon was trying to make a simple point, the same point his mentor Anscombe made in 1956 when she protested Oxford University’s giving an honorary degree to President Truman despite his order to drop atomic bombs on Japan: We should not legitimate murder, the intentional taking of innocent life. For Solomon, a university is where the truths of faith and reason are clarified through the practice of argument.
Like most philosophers, Solomon lived by arguments. One time he quibbled with a colleague for saying that John Rawls was “unarguably” the best philosopher of his generation. Solomon, no fan of Rawls, said the word should be “arguably.”
Solomon liked good arguments. And did not like bad ones. In Morality and Modernity, a student would inevitably challenge him for criticizing modern science while enjoying the benefits of modern medicine — to which he would reply, “Ah, the Novocain argument,” and break it down one fallacy at a time. And I’ll never forget his prepared response to a lecture on medical ethics that characterized the Catholic approach to moral issues as “both/and.” He posed a series of questions: “So did Pope Pius X both condemn modernism and not condemn it? In Evangelium Vitae, is Pope John Paul II both for abortion and against it? Now as I press this argument, you may think I’m not being fair; but with a both-and approach to Catholicism, it seems we can be both fair and unfair.” He was not one to suffer a cliché gladly.
Solomon’s contribution to Notre Dame was thinking, talking, reasoning and debating his way to the truth. Along the way, he found himself increasingly attracted to the Catholic world that had struck him as so strange. For this, he credited his colleagues: McInerny, Fred Freddoso ’76Ph.D. and MacIntyre in philosophy; Fathers Marvin O’Connell ’59Ph.D. and Bill Miscamble ’80Ph.D., ’87M.Div., in history; many others, too many to list. But however much he owed the community, we received more in the love for Catholicism he imparted to us, a love that culminated when he and Lou were received into the Catholic Church in May 2024.
The last time I saw David was at the Fall Conference last November. He was sitting with Lou outside the conference rooms surrounded by students. The Solomons had reached the stage in marriage where one learns the real meaning of “in sickness and in health.” When David died in February, age 81, scores of his former students flew in for the funeral to celebrate his life with Lou, their son Reed ’92, daughter Elizabeth ’95 and their families. A lot of philosophy was discussed that day. After the burial at Cedar Grove, we convened for a reception at the Stadium for more stories and tributes, agreeing that we are much better off for having known David Solomon. Unarguably.
Michael Baxter is a visiting associate professor at Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life.