GERARD WATSON  (1933-1998)  

Student 1951-58

Professor of Classics 1959-98

 

Born in Randalstown, Co. Antrim, Gerard Watson studied at Maynooth 1951-8, being awarded a first-class honours Arts degree in Classics in 1954; he  was ordained in Rome in February 1959. He was immediately appointed to Chair of Classics at Maynooth, first completing a Ph.D at Queen's University, Belfast with a thesis on the Stoic theory of knowledge.

He was deeply involved in the expansion of Classics education under the new regime at Maynooth that led to the its emergence as a respected secular university (by the 1980s NUI Maynooth had the largest proportion of Classics scholars per head of student population of any third-level institution in Britain or Ireland).

A specialist in Greek Philosophy and Patristics, he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1978. His published works included The Stoic Theory of Knowledge (1966), Plato's Unwritten Teaching (1973), St Augustine, the Platonists and the Resurrection Body (1984), Phantasia in Classical Thought (1988), and Greek Philosophy and the Christian Notion of God (1994). He also contributed articles to a number of theological, pastoral and philosophical publications. He died in 1998 at the age of sixty-five and is buried in the Historic Maynooth College Cemetery. His brother Richard, a scientist and also a Maynooth alumnus, was  a member of the academic staff of the NUI recognised college in its transition to Maynooth University between 1973 and 2008.