Final Salute

Neal W. Gilbert Obituary

Neal Ward Gilbert, a professor emeritus of philosophy at UC Davis, died on April 8, 2020 at the age of 95.

He was born in Washington, D.C., the second son of Wilfred Charles Gilbert and Esther (Ulrickson) Gilbert.

His paternal grandparents, the well-known Biblical scholar George Holley Gilbert and Flora Louise (Gates) Gilbert were born in Vermont. His maternal grandfather Nils Otto Ulrickson, immigrated from Sweden to work in Vermont’s Proctor Marble Quarry. Neal always felt his heritage to be Vermont and her people, even if he was born elsewhere.

Neal graduated from the Theodore Roosevelt Business High School in Washington, D.C. and then attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill for two years. During World War II he was drafted into the U.S. Navy Seabees and sent with his battalion, the 136th, to Oahu and Guam. At the war’s end he was stationed in Sasebo, Japan, where he visited the ruins of Nagasaki.

After his discharge from the Navy, Neal attended Dartmouth College, where he greatly enjoyed hiking and camping with the Outing Club. He graduated magna cum laude in 1948. He later received his Ph.D. in the history of philosophy from Columbia University where he studied under renowned Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller.

Neal initially taught at North Carolina State College, and later at Cornell, Columbia and the University of Buffalo. In 1962, he joined the UCD philosophy department as an associate professor and served as chairman. His doctoral thesis, published in 1961 by Columbia University Press as Renaissance Concepts of Method, is regarded as a standard work in the history of philosophy.

He published a number of scholarly articles and book reviews in the course of his career. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1968 and the year he spent researching manuscripts in the ancient libraries of Europe was one of the highlights of his life. Along with Professor Paul Castelfranco, he helped create the Religious Studies major at UCD. In 2014, he self-published “The Eternal Feud: Renaissance Perspectives on Ancients versus Moderns.”

Neal had two children with his first wife, Milena Matuska: Avery Nelson Gilbert (Susanne) of Fort Collins, Colo., and Lenore Phyllis Gilbert of Davis. With his second wife, Alfaretta (Crane) Adamson of Walnut Grove, he retired to the family homestead in Dorset, Vt. They moved back to Davis in 2004, where they lived until her death on April 2, 2020, at the age of 93. Neal will be interred in the Gilbert family plot in Dorset’s Maple Hill Cemetery.

In addition to his children, he is survived by his granddaughters Alice Holley Gilbert of Los Angeles, and Lydia Grace Gilbert of Brooklyn, N.Y.