Logician, scholar of ancient Greek philosophy and language

Charles (“Chuck”) Young, longtime Claremont resident and professor of philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, died at home on August 30 in the loving arms of his wife of 40 years. He was 79.

“Chuck was loved and admired by his family, friends, colleagues, and students,” his family shared. “They knew him to be generous with his time and knowledge, eager to learn, always ready with a joke, and happy to discuss everything from philosophy to chess, natural history, voting systems, track and field, politics, and cooking.” His annual “2,400th Plato’s birthday parties” in the 1970s through the 1990s brought the Claremont Colleges philosophy community to his home for his Texas mad dog chili — which also won him the 1977 Claremont Chili Cook-Off.

In his professional life, he loved teaching above all. Students in philosophy, religion, and other disciplines attended his classes and ancient Greek reading groups, and many later achieved distinguished academic careers.

He was born July 17, 1945 in Roanoke, Virginia, the first child of Dorothy Christopher Young and Charles M. Young, Jr., a career U.S. Army officer who attained the rank of brigadier general, serving at the Pentagon. As an Army child, he lived in several U.S. states and in Europe. Because the family moved frequently, he had few friends, so he immersed himself in reading — a habit that lasted for the rest of his life — and in chess. He competed in chess tournaments on Army bases and later in high school and college. In 1968 he graduated from Rice University, in Houston, Texas, with a B.A. in philosophy and mathematics. For his graduate training he moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1974 with a dissertation on Plato.

Two years earlier, in 1972, he joined the philosophy faculty at Claremont Graduate School (later Claremont Graduate University), where he would teach Plato, Aristotle, ancient Greek language, ethics, and logic for the next four and-a-half decades. He met the woman he would later marry, Nancy, when she entered the CGS philosophy doctoral program in 1974. He held an Andrew Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh in 1975-76 and visiting professorships at the University of California, Riverside; Scripps College; Pitzer College; and the University of California, Irvine, over the following years.

In 1988 he co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Aristotle at St. John’s University, in Collegeville, Minnesota. There he and his wife also learned about and became lifetime supporters of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. In 1996 he traveled to Kuwait to help establish a master’s program in philosophy at Kuwait University. For several years he served on the board of the Journal of the History of Philosophy in Claremont, and edited JHP’s Monograph series. Always an animal lover, he was also a member of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Western University of Health Sciences, in Pomona, for over a decade.

Over the course of his long career, he published many articles and monographs on Plato and Aristotle, two co-authored textbooks on formal logic, and papers on topics such as “An architechtonic of verbs” and “Computation with Roman numerals.” He also contributed translations of and commentary on Aristotle’s “Nichomachian Ethics, Book V,” to the online database Archelogos, and published many invited reviews of other scholars’ works on ancient Greek philosophy.

He is survived by his wife, Dr. Nancy Young, of Claremont; sister, Dr. Connie Young, of Gainesville, Virginia; brother, Dr. Chris Young, of Richmond, Virginia; and several nieces and nephews.