In Memoriam John W. Yolton 1921-2005

An obituary for John W. Yolton, a prolific writer and a highly regarded editor, who died in 2005, is presented. Perhaps as important as Yolton's writing was his teaching. Nobody who sat in on one of his classes could not but be impressed with the way in which he was able to hold a class's attention to a text of Descartes, Locke or Hume and engage first year or graduate students in a scrutiny of the text, perhaps only a paragraph or even a sentence long, teasing out its ambiguities and its place in an argument, to the obvious enlightenment of students who until then had found early modern philosophical prose dull and uncaptivating.