Mark Sacks, the founder of the European Journal of Philosophy and its editor from 1993 to 2000, died in the summer of last year from prostate cancer, at the age of 54. Without Sacks, the journal would not have come into existence, and with his early death the philosophical community in Britain and abroad suffers a significant and deeply regretted loss. Sacks came to Europe at a relatively late point in his life, a circumstance which played no doubt an important role in forming his perception of the situation of philosophy in Europe. Born in South Africa, his family moved to Israel when he was still very young, and Sacks was brought up in Jerusalem, where he completed his schooling and first degree, and where his father was professor of clinical microbiology and infectious diseases. As a teenager he declined the option of training for the national swimming squad—which, he noted, might well have seen him included in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics—and studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Philosophy occupied for him at this time, however, a secondary place in the hierarchy of his interests, and Sacks in any case did not proceed directly to a PhD, but after a semester as a visiting student at Columbia University in New York spent three years completing his national service in the Israeli army. This included service in the adjutant’s office of Central Command, with responsibility for executing troop deployments in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and long stretches of night duty, which he used to write plays, and which established an enduring taste for nocturnal existence. His national service finished, Sacks resolved upon graduate work in philosophy, but did so in large part because he believed it would provide a way of pursuing in the longer term his literary ambitions, which indeed he never finally abandoned. Supported by funding from the British Council, Sacks came to King’s College Cambridge in 1980 to write a PhD under the supervision of Bernard Williams. Williams’ sceptical view of the ambitious project which Sacks had set himself—an account of the significance of ontological commitment in the context of transcendental idealism—resulted in a difficult relationship, but one marked by mutual respect, and Williams later supported the EJP by contributing an article on Nietzsche and moral psychology. While at Cambridge, Sacks engaged closely with the tradition of Kant interpretation deriving from P. F. Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense, yet found himself in terms of his philosophical interests somewhat at the edge of Cambridge’s philosophical world, which was dominated at the time by