LONDON, ENGLAND.- Philosopher Richard Wollheim, 80, died of heart failure at his home in London. Professor Wollheim received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford in History and in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In 1949, after service in the British Army, he was appointed as Lecturer at University College, London, where he stayed until 1982, serving as Head of the Philosophy Department there from 1963 until 1982. He then taught at Columbia University for three years, coming to Berkeley in 1985. Between 1989 and 1996 he split his time between Berkeley and U.C. Davis.
He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1982 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1986. In recent years he has been the Cassirer Lecturer at Yale, the Luce Visiting Scholar at Yale’s Humanities Center, the Gareth Evans Memorial Lecturer at Oxford, the Roland Penrose Lecturer at the Tate Gallery, the Werner Heisenberg Lecturer at the Bavarian Academy, and the Lindley Lecturer at the University of Kansas. At the time of his passing he was President of the British Society of Aesthetics and a member of the faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He was Chair of the Berkeley Philosophy Department from 1998 to 2002.