Fonds 1780 - John Greer Slater fonds

Identity area

Reference code

UTA 1780

Title

John Greer Slater fonds

Date(s)

  • 1884-2011 (Creation)

Level of description

Fonds

Extent and medium

4.49 m of textual and graphic records and publications (35 boxes)

Context area

Name of creator

(1930-2022)

Biographical history

John Greer Slater was born in the United States on June 1st, 1930 and immigrated to Canada in the mid 1960’s. His major research interest is the philosopher Bertrand Russell. During his time at the University of Toronto, Professor Slater assembled the world’s largest collection of print material by and about Bertrand Russell. The collection comprises approximately 10,000 items, and helped establish the University of Toronto as a major centre for Russell studies. He also donated 8,500 philosophy books to the Fisher Rare Book Library in 1990 that form a complete collection of American, Canadian and Australian philosophy from 1870 to the time of donation.

Professor Slater earned a B.A. with High Honours from the University of Florida in 1955, followed by an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1956. He completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Michigan in 1961. The title of his Ph.D. thesis was A Methodological Study of Ordinary Language of Philosophy.

Following his doctoral studies, Professor Slater was a teaching fellow, instructor, and part-time lecturer at the University of Michigan between 1956 and 1961. He was then an instructor at Wayne State University for the spring term of 1960 and 1961. Following those positions, Professor Slater was an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, before being awarded tenure and being appointed to the Graduate School at the University of Toronto in 1964. Professor Slater was an associate professor of Philosophy from 1964 until 1988, when he was promoted to Professor.

Professor Slater mainly taught courses on the history of philosophy, logic, and the foundations of mathematics. He taught Logic, Knowledge and Reality; Modern Symbolic Logic; Bertrand Russell; and Introduction to Political Philosophy at the undergraduate level as well as Political Philosophy; Modern Logic; and Bradley and Russell at the graduate level.

At the University of Toronto Professor Slater held a number of administrative positions. Between 1969 and 1974 he served as chairman of the Department of Philosophy, chairman of the Graduate Department of Philosophy, and chairman of the Department of Ethics at University College simultaneously. Between 1981 and 1985 he was acting chairman of the Department of Philosophy, and he also served on all of the department’s standing committees as well as a number of its ad hoc committees.

Professor Slater was also active in a number of professional associations, including the American Philosophical Association, the Canadian Philosophical Association, where he served on the Executive Committee between 1969 and 1972, and the Ontario Philosophical Society.

Throughout his career, Professor Slater edited five volumes of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, for which he won three SSHRC grants. He also edited five other books, including Pragmatism and Purpose: Essays Presented to Thomas A. Goudge (1981), and wrote a chapter of the book Russell in Review (1976). Professor Slater wrote a number of articles, book introductions, book reviews, papers and addresses, the majority of which reflected his research on Bertrand Russell as well as Logic and Philosophy. Between 1970 and 1983, Professor Slater served on the Bertrand Russell Archives Advisory Committee, and he has been a member of the Editorial Board of Russell since 1970.

Professor Slater has received honours for his work, including National Science Foundation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He is also a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, and Phi Eta Sigma. Professor Slater retired officially on July 1, 1995. He died on November 19, 2022.

Archival history

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Content and structure area

Scope and content

This fonds contains records related to the researching and publishing activities of Professor John Greer Slater, philosopher and professor at the University of Toronto. The series documenting both his research on Bertrand Russell, and the publication of his book Minerva’s Aviary, are the two largest. There is also a relatively large amount of material documenting his administrative activities within the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and his book collecting. Throughout this fonds there are a lot of press clippings, particularly in his personal and autobiographical records, though there are also many in the Bertrand Russell series and the Department of Philosophy Series.

The records include correspondence, notes, drafts, manuscripts, press clippings and photographs.

The bulk of the records are contained in accession B2014-0039. Also included are 2 boxes of correspondence, memoranda, reports, monographs and newspaper clippings accumulated by Professor Slater as a member of the Provost's Committee to Review the Relationships between the University of Toronto and OISE (accession B1985-0026) found in Series 3.

Notably absent from this fonds is any teaching material. In addition, the Addresses series contains mainly flyers about addresses that Professor Slater has either given or attended, but does not contain the text of any of his addresses.

Appraisal, destruction and scheduling

Accruals

System of arrangement

Conditions of access and use area

Conditions governing access

Select files in series 2 and 3 are restricted for 30 years from the latest file date, all other files are open.
-B2014-0039/008(05)-(08),
-B2014-0039/008(10),
-B2014-0039/009(03),
-B2014-0039/009 (09),
-B2014-0039/009 (12),
-B2014-0039/009 (15),
-B2014-0039/009 (17), and
-B2014-0039/009 (20).

See series descriptions and file lists for more detail.

Conditions governing reproduction

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Script of material

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Finding aids

Uploaded finding aid

Allied materials area

Existence and location of originals

Existence and location of copies

Related units of description

See also the oral history with Dr. Slater and the John Slater Papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (linked below)

Notes area

Alternative identifier(s)

Accession

B2014-0039

Accession

B1985-0026

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Description control area

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