10.1177/0090591704273537 ROBERT DENOON CUMMING (1916-2004) Robert Denoon Cumming died on August 25, 2004, in his 88th year. He was the distinguished Frederick J. E. Woodbridge Professor Emeritus of Phi- losophy at Columbia, a member of the Editorial Board of Political Theory since its first appearance, editor in 1965 of the first English-language compi- lation of Sartre’s philosophical writings, and author, between 1991 and 2001, of a four-volume study collectively entitled Phenomenology and Decons- truction (Chicago), which deftly explicates the philosophical issues uncov- ered by a comparative and historical study of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida. Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence (Chi- cago, 1979) prepared the way for the series. Writing in the TLS in the year before Cumming’s death, Simon Glendinning provides a glowing and canny review of this “connected series of very long but stunningly elegant books,” with special attention to the subtle interplay between Cumming’s self- announced “submergence” of his own philosophical initiative in the service of the history of philosophy and Cumming’s “extraordinary” philosophical initiative that expresses itself precisely in the original and finely honed method of the work. 1 Glendinning’s characterization of Cumming will ring true to generations of Columbia political theory students, who knew him as the self-effacing and yare mainstay of the remarkable crews that taught the yearlong course on “Political Theory in the Context of Institutions,” initiated by Franz L. Neumann and required of all graduate students in government (later political science) for more than twenty years, until it was discontinued after 1968. During those years, however, he was unmatched as a teacher and counselor of political theorists. My own experience will speak for many. I had asked him to read my mas- ter’s essay, a bumptious attempt to refute Popper on Plato. Cumming returned the papers very promptly, together with four or five closely written oversized yellow pages of comments, objections, and questions. They were precise, informed, penetrating, and thus a potentially threatening gift. In fear, I asked him whether I would have to meet all of his points before I could earn my degree. He laughed and said that he thought that the paper was excellent for a master’s essay. “These comments are for you,” he said. He took us as his 1 POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. XX No. X, Month 2005 1- DOI: 10.1177/0090591704273537 © 2005 Sage Publications