Ted Humphrey

Ted Humphrey was born in White Plains, New York, and raised in California. His mother was a registered nurse and his father a heavy-duty mechanic. He was the first member of his family to go to college. As a top scholarship student from a small town, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, but found large freshman lectures difficult to manage. He wrote for SLATE, an early campus political magazine linked to the New Left and Free Speech Movement era, then left Berkeley, attended community college for a time, and continued at the University of California, Riverside.

Humphrey earned an A.B. and M.A. in philosophy from UC Riverside in 1964. Teachers who shaped him included Peter Fuss and Philip Wheelwright, connecting him to traditions of Kant interpretation associated with Ernst Cassirer and the Marburg school. He completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at UC San Diego in 1968 in a department founded around the history of classical modern philosophy. Herbert Marcuse directed his Kant dissertation after rejecting an earlier dissertation topic as meeting formal requirements without deep learning. Marcuse's seminar and mentorship, alongside colleagues such as Richard H. Popkin and Stanley Moore, placed Humphrey in a line of Kant scholarship influenced by Heideggerian and critical-theory currents while leaving him free to pursue his own projects.

Humphrey joined ASU in 1966 to teach the history of classical modern philosophy. He chaired the Philosophy Department from 1974 to 1983 and built faculty strength with appointments that became nationally prominent. From 1983 he directed the university's honors program and, in 1988, became founding dean of Barrett, the Honors College after Board of Regents approval. He led Barrett until 2003, overseeing endowment naming for Craig and Barbara Barrett, a distinctive humanities-centered curriculum including The Human Event, and national visibility that drew visiting campuses and large numbers of National Merit Scholars. He served as president of the National Collegiate Honors Council. After 2003 he returned to full-time teaching and research as President's Professor, Barrett Professor, and Lincoln Professor of Ethics, remaining a member of ASU's Distinguished Teaching Academy until retirement in 2015.

Humphrey's early scholarship focused on classical modern philosophy and Kant. His Hackett translations of Kant's Enlightenment political and historical essays, including Perpetual Peace and related texts, became widely used classroom standards. After a long administrative period, he decided around 2000 to leave further Kant projects and shift to Latin American intellectual history. He took leave to gain fluency in Spanish and Portuguese, collected primary materials, and with Janet M. Burke published anthologies and translations that brought Spanish-language pensadores into English teaching canons, including nineteenth-century nation-building texts, Mexican liberty debates, and conquest-era narratives. He argued that Cold War politics and loyalty-oath culture had frozen serious U.S. engagement with Latin American philosophy even while literary culture remained celebrated.

Humphrey was survived by his partner, Joy Dunlevie, with whom he traveled in retirement; his children Greg and Alison; and five grandchildren. He often spoke of his working-class parents and first-generation college path as grounding his commitment to open access and rigorous undergraduate education. Colleagues and students remembered a carefully trimmed beard, booming voice, tailored sport coat, and deep laughter in the classroom.

In teaching and interviews Humphrey emphasized undergraduate education as formation of free persons, not only job training. Drawing on Kant, he described a Kingdom of Ends of free rational beings and warned that reducing education to workforce credentialing was a reductive materialist victory. He modeled short lectures and long student discussion, insisted classrooms be places where fallibility could be admitted, and defended honors education as combining research-university resources with small-college attention. His Latin American turn was motivated by recovering silenced intellectual traditions and by Kantian questions about European encounters with the New World.

Barrett, the Honors College remains Humphrey's principal institutional legacy: a public honors college model visited and studied across the United States, a driver of ASU's National Merit recruitment, and home to The Human Event seminar he helped define. Nationally he influenced honors standards through the National Collegiate Honors Council. As a scholar he left standard Kant translations and a late body of Latin American intellectual-history work with Janet Burke. Scholarship funds in his name continue to support first-generation and first-time freshman honors students.

Humphrey was named a President's Professor at ASU, held the Barrett Professorship and a Lincoln Professorship of Ethics, and belonged to ASU's Distinguished Teaching Academy. He received multiple organizations' highest teaching honors, and the Arizona Republic cited him as a force for excellent undergraduate education in Arizona. He served as president of the National Collegiate Honors Council. Barrett was named Best Honors College by Reader's Digest in 2005 during the era shaped by his founding vision.

Major publications and translations include Hackett editions of Kant's Enlightenment essays and Perpetual Peace; with Janet M. Burke, Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition (Hackett, 2007); contributions connected to Liberty in Mexico; The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Bernal Diaz del Castillo) translation (Hackett, 2012); The Essential Diaz abridgment (2014); and further planned or published projects on Latin American moral voices and Cortes's letters. A long 2020 interview with the Platypus Review discusses Kant, Marcuse, and undergraduate free expression. Video interviews with Cheltenham and UK Philosophers feature Humphrey on Kantian themes and contemporary politics.

Ted Humphrey died peacefully on 7 October 2026 at the age of 85. Public notices, including an Arizona Republic obituary, asked memorial gifts for the Ted Humphrey Scholarship Endowment at the ASU Foundation or for university student food pantries. Cause of death was not made public in those notices. He was remembered as founding dean of Barrett and as a teacher whose booming presence and seminar style defined honors education at ASU for a generation.