Charles E. Scott Obituary
Charles E. Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Vanderbilt University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Penn State University, a highly regarded continental philosopher, died on March 30, 2026. He was 90.
Dr. Scott’s contributions to continental philosophy were highly influential. He published 17 books and anthologies—among them Living with Indifference, The Lives of Things, The Question of Ethics, and Telling Silence. In 2020 he co-authored with Nancy Tuana Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, Anzaldúa. He published over 200 articles and chapters on thinkers such as Foucault, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as on topics such as psychoanalysis, ethics, death and dying, and love. He was working on a new manuscript, Ever For Ever Now. He served as the Director of the Robert Penn Warran Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt as well as the Founding Director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Ethics.
Charles Scott’s philosophy, Michael Naas explains, “always begins, like philosophy itself, in wonder, in astonishment, though that wonder is often to be found in places that are rarely taken seriously, let alone explored, by philosophy. He begins the first chapter of The Lives of Things by suggesting that ‘facts’—fact of all things!—’are as effective as ‘poetic experiences’ in occasioning astonishment and a sense of wonder.’ We are now in the wondrous universe of Charles Scott, for whom ‘experiences of astonishment do not require universal necessity or something transcendent beyond our worlds of meaning.’”
Dr. Scott brought that deep sense of wonder to the classroom. Students remember him as a powerful orator with a keen sense of humor. He was as John Lysaker recounted, “one who gives us back to ourselves richer than ever without robbing us of the task that each of us is, the task of finding ourselves in the conduct of life.” Robert Bernasconi writes, “For an original thinker, Charles Scott had the rare ability to be able to help others develop their own ideas both in private and in conferences. I for one benefited enormously from his penetrating yet generous questions: they were never dismissive and always intended to move the discussion forward.”
Amongst his many academic achievements is his life-long effort to cultivate a poietic approach to philosophy in order to gesture to that which cannot be comprehended directly. Key to this effort was his recovery of middle-voice, an approach to philosophy that attunes us to what he referred to as “astonishment in the face of things,” and which enables us to experience, as Walter Brogan phrased it, “the occurrence of things outside the range of the explanatory power of human subjectivity.” In reference to his recent book, Telling Silence, David Krell emphasized that “Charles Scott does not write the way other philosophers write. He does not think the way they think. Silence tells him much more than it does the rest of us. If readers allow their imaginations to be stretched, Scott will show them how many and vast are the secrets of silence.” As Scott phrased it, middle voice and poietic language and thought “will incline people to let go of what the language is talking about and will incline them to let what the language is talking about reveal itself on its own . . . .to become aware in letting what they are talking about happen as it happens.”
Dr. Scott was active in the Collegium Phaenomenologicum for over forty years and was involved in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy since its inception. His honors include the 2024 Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle Compass Award, bestowed in
recognition of his “pointing the way to a more inclusive and compassionate world and for a career promoting philosophy in its global diversity.” He was the recipient of the 2006 Diversity Initiative Award at Vanderbilt University. His work was the focus of a 2011 conference at Penn State University.
Raised in Wewoka, Oklahoma, Dr. Scott earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Southern Methodist University and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University. He studied for a year at Eberhard-Karls Universitaet in Tuebingen, Germany. He taught at Vanderbilt University and at Penn State University.
He is survived by his wife, Nancy Tuana; his children, Stuart, Becky, and Charlie; seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
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