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Edward Pols died on 14 August 2005, in Brunswick, Maine, within weeks of completing his volume of philosophical essays, On Rational Agency, and his volume of poetry, Remembrance of Things to Come. That his life ended in active engagement with both philosophy and poetry befits his extraordinary career, which spanned almost sixty years. He made substantial contributions to metaphysics and epistemology, as well as to logic, ethics, and aesthetics. In some of his poetry his philosophy is expressed in a form that transcends even his own elegant and lucid prose. A philosopher of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts, a remarkable poet, and a person of uncommon grace and dignity, he was surely a Renaissance man of our time.
He was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 1 February 1919. There he attended St. Benedict's Preparatory School, after which he earned his bachelor's degree in English at Harvard College, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1940. His graduate study in philosophy at Harvard was postponed by active service during and after World War II in Army Intelligence and in Military Government (1942-46). He was stationed in England, France, and Germany, and he earned a Bronze Star. During those years he wrote hundreds of letters about the war to his wife, Eileen Sinnott Pols, whom he married in 1942 and with whom he had six children. These letters eventually...