May 9, 2008

Fond and Fearful Memories of an Influential Professor

By ELLEN HANDLER SPITZ

Recently I learned by chance that one of my revered professors, Mary Mothersill, died this past January. There had been no article in The New York Times. Profoundly shaken, I conjured her up and thought about how much she gave throughout the decades of her career, teaching philosophy at Barnard College and at Columbia University — where, as a graduate student in the 1980s, I first encountered her in a seminar on the minor dialogues of Plato. Austere and accomplished, reared in an