Fonds - Joseph Boyle Fonds

Joseph Boyle was born on July 30th, 1942, in Philadelphia, PA to a devoutly Catholic family. His early education, including primary and secondary, was done in a Catholic environment where he would continue this streak by attending the college division of St. Charles Seminary located in Philadelphia in 1960, learning Latin and introducing him to philosophy, before eventually transferring to LaSalle University where he completed his Bachelor of Arts. In his final year of his B.A. he applied to Georgetown University’s graduate program in philosophy, and began his doctorate at Georgetown in 1965, where he met his lifelong collaborator and friend, Germain Grisez, then a professor there who taught Boyle in a course on the ethical theory of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Spring of 1966. In the same year, Boyle would marry his wife, Barbara Dean, having four children over the course of their marriage, Marion, Thomas, Deirdre, and MaryAnne.

In the summer of 1966, Boyle undertook a direct readings course on Longeran under Grisez and would continue to have him as a tutor and director for when he completed his dissertation titled “The Argument from Self-Referential Consistency: The Current Discussion” between the spring of 1968 and fall of 1969, receiving honors for his dissertation and earning his PhD in 1970.

While completing his PhD, he worked a temporary college-level teaching job at St. Fidelis College where he taught philosophy to Capuchin seminarians in small classes, providing a good foundation and learning space for Boyle to begin his career as a philosophy professor. In 1970, he would be hired as an assistant professor at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he would teach for five years, becoming active in founding and leading the local pro-life group which pushed Boyle to work more in bioethics and moral philosophy. It was also during this time that him, Grisez, and another friend, Olaf Tollefsen, would collaborate on a book on free choice which was finished in 1975.

For the 1975-76 academic year, Boyle would complete a one-year residency at Brown University, working under Roderick Chisholm and begin seriously working on the philosophical topic of intention. Through another resident, Thomas Sullivan, Boyle would be hired at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul Minnesota, in 1976 where he would continue to collaborate with Grisez, most notably in a co-authored volume on euthanasia and Boyle’s assistance with Grisez’s large project on moral theology, finished in 1980.

In 1981, Boyle left his position at the College of St. Thomas to work at the Centre for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. During this time, Boyle would collaborate once again with Grisez and another friend, John Finnis, on common work, eventually culminating in the publishing of a co-authored book on nuclear deterrence, published in 1987.

In 1986, Boyle would be offered a position at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. Before his movie to Toronto, Boyle participated in a conference on moral theology, meeting and becoming friends with the famous philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. By 1989, Boyle was elected president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and in 1991, became Principal of St. Michael’s College filling the position for two terms from 1991-2002. After his terms as Principal, Boyle returned to the classroom and research, publishing works on theory of action and practical reason, while also completing two shorter administrative tasks as interim and acting chair of the University of Toronto’s Philosophy Department from 2008-2009.

Boyle would also act as a Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton from 2010-2011 and lead a philosophy of religion reading group at the Department of Philosophy of UofT from 2013-2016 after his retirement.

Boyle’s philosophical work focused on a variety of different topics including end of life issues such as provision of nutrition and hydration at end of life, palliative sedation, allocation of scarce resources, and the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary care. His other work on nuclear deterrence as well as end-of-life ethics, bioethics, and new natural law theory relied heavily on his work on intention, side effect, and the principle of double effect which have been widely cited and discussed.

Boyle died in Toronto, Ontario on September 22nd, 2016 surrounded by his family.