Helen de Cruz (1978-2025), RIP

Please consider donating to this fundraising effort (here) to support Helen de Cruz’s family.

There is no greater joy for a teacher than to see a student develop and grow; and no more satisfaction to a mentor than to be overshadowed professionally by one’s mentee. I have followed Helen’s intellectual development and blossoming professional career with curiosity, pride, admiration, and (of course) wonder. It’s a cruel, unnatural fate to have to write about Helen in the past tense.

My heart goes out to Johan and their kids, Aliénor and Gabriel. Helen was the main breadwinner in the family. And before they were admitted to hospice, Helen asked me to help signal-boost the fund-raising to support them. [Please donate here.]

Back in 2010, I started corresponding with Helen de Cruz because they posted a question about the relationship between the PSR and causation on a listserv. I had just moved to my position in Ghent, and I mistakenly thought Helen was a Leibniz scholar at Leuven. I was hoping we could team up to strengthen early modern philosophy in the Low Countries.

A few weeks later, at a philosophy of science conference, I saw Helen give a brilliant, somewhat unusual paper in which they combined Bayesianism with philosophy of archeology. (This was part of a project organized by Igor Douven.) In between Helen received a postdoc from, I think, the Flemish research council. At the conference, we talked, and I got my first glimpse of one the rawest and purest philosophical talents I have ever encountered. Helen was ambitious with a big, magnanimous and musical heart. In subsequent years, they and Sarit bonded over their anti-Brexit activism.

After the workshop we met at, Helen and I teamed up to organize a workshop on ‘empirically informed philosophy of social science.’ And thus started a nearly constant fifteen-year conversation mostly mediated by social media, while they were raising a family, dealing with sexism in the academy (looking especially at you Leuven; here’s how they put it once, “They were not a woman-friendly department”), moving jobs to Amsterdam (where we saw each other most frequently in person), the Oxford Brookes University in Oxford (where they hosted me for a talk at Blackwells), and, eventually, as Danforth Chair in St. Louis. In between there were happy stints at Oxford University thanks to postdoctoral fellowships of the British Academy and Templeton residential fellowships. Helen’s website also mentions a FWO postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leeds.

Along the way, I wrote letters of the recommendation and often acted as their ad hoc placement director; we co-blogged at NewAPPS; they edited my paper on Ibn Tufayl for their wonderful collection, Philosophy Illustrated; I diligently read their work on wonder and the Enlightenment, and I learned all about cognitive science/neuroscience of religion through their work (much of it with Johan). We avidly read each other’s blogs, and I always read their speculative fiction. It’s fair to say that without having to coordinate we boosted each other’s signals as best as we could. Whenever I could, I would use their drawings in my class-room lectures. If I needed a moment’s quiet, I would listen to Helen sing on the archlute.

The intensity and multiplicity of their pace didn’t shock me. When you discern how everything is connected with everything, tracing out the connections is encountering the familiar in the most unexpected places. I adore their illustrated edition of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. With the renewed interest in women authors, this work had been quickly moved into the early modern philosophy canon. But it’s actually rather awkward fit in the classroom. I abandoned teaching it. Helen encountered the same problem, and diagnosed it, and then did something constructive and instructive about it (here). Let me quote them, “I love this book very dearly but it is not an easy read. I hope my illustrations will help to make it easier to read.”

Even so, I felt that Helen was doing too much public service; if a job had to be done Helen would step up: committees, causes, editing of journals, hosting conferences, etc. We often talked about time-management and learning to say no. Institutions don’t respect boundaries, alas; and as they never failed to remind me, care/service work is gendered. When Helen was first diagnosed with cancer, I hoped it would be an opportunity for them to back out from many commitments. I passed on the wisdom from my occupational physician that a major health scare could be a chance to reorganize life.

After they read my Adam Smith monograph, Helen started to pester me for a follow up, more popular book on the Enlightenment. Helen was increasingly convinced that the public, self-described ‘friends of the Enlightenment’ like Pinker (and his acolytes) were misrepresenting its true spirit. When they looked back at it while reading and listening to the sources, Helen saw insatiable curiosity and wit, irony and receptive cross-cultural exchange who delighted in global travel reports and discovering blazing worlds through telescopes and microscopes—kindred spirits. They increasingly loathed the dogmatism and sense of moral superiority to put down others with which the Enlightenment was deliberately being associated.

I knew I couldn’t tell the coherent story they wanted. And much to my surprise, I heard myself say, I think you should do it. You can always run things by me. They would pepper me with questions about Van der Ende, Leibniz, and Fontenelle. Often, I first knew they were reading and assimilating some dense past text because I caught subtle allusions to them in the brilliant short science fiction stories they would share (and publish). The book would focus on the great intellectual and social omnivores (like herself). At one point when they were quizzing me well beyond my knowledge, I said: Helen, I don’t know, you are the expert. We ‘lol-ed’, but it was true.

When I first got to know Helen as a scholar, I thought of her as a philosopher of religion and a philosopher of math. They used up-to-date cognitive science and evolutionary theory to frame their questions and answers. Their intellectual partnership in these areas with Johan was incredibly fertile. They would sometimes team up with my (now past) colleagues at Ghent. But their work lacked the crass reductionism of bad Darwinian explanations (fill in your favorite exemplar) because they could draw on Helen’s background in anthropology. When I tried to explain it to others, I would say things like ‘imagine a cross of Pascal Boyer, Dan Sperber, and Bill Wimsatt.’

I once jokingly said to Helen that you are doing what Hobbes and Hume only could imagine. (I had made a similar joke a decade earlier to Dennett while he was drafting Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.) Next thing I knew, I was reading the draft of “The Relevance of Hume’s Natural History of Religion for Cognitive Science of Religion.” They didn’t just see anticipations of their own work, they could also appreciate how the past could still instruct. I lack the knowledge to situate them authoritatively in the development of cognitive science of religion as an emerging field.

As the illness developed, we ‘practiced backing out of commitments’ on ourselves. A few years before, when I was still very sick with long covid, we had agreed to co-author, “The New Science and the Sublime” for an OUP Handbook on the Sublime. I knew they had said yes as a favor to me; to make me feel I still had a professional future. In our chapter, we would investigate the sublime in early modern science, with a specific focus on early science popularization. As they withdrew, I had to narrow, of course, the focus of the subsequent chapter.

When we met, Helen identified as Christian, including as an active member for the Society for Christian Philosophers. Helen adored their fellowship. But Stateside Helen grew alienated from Christianity due to the mean politics, but not spirituality (go read what Helen wrote on this here). Their budding Spinozism was not far from my own (more mystical) Platonizing Spinoza, but (to be precise) closer to Alex Douglas’ (who they interviewed here).

Helen’s sister was a physicist who became a TV celebrity in their native Flanders for her work educating the public on the climate crisis. Helen’s mom was the daughter of a general-major in the Belgian air force. Their father was a migrant from Malaysia. And their parents met at a detention center for immigrants, where she volunteered. He ended up working in construction as a bricklayer. Helen often intimated that they were treated as outsider in school. But that they had a happy childhood surrounded by music (including the church choir) and art.

When you look over their CV you will notice that Helen wrote on an immense variety of topics, including ones we now call ‘meta-philosophy.’ Many of these papers originate in the (‘why is this philosophy?’) objections they encountered. This also includes the co-edited volume with Johan and Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible. People always wanted to close intellectual borders, while Helen was always and everywhere showing that there were paths to be trodden. If data was absent for some problem they wanted to tackle, Helen found a way to do the study (or nudge others into doing it).

Helen had a rare skill to write for multiple audiences at once. And I am pleased that a wider public will be able share in that with Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.

When we started to discuss the end, I expected a meditative turn. But our last most serious chat was focused on the nature of ambition. Instead, Helen threw herself in more work, including organizing the posthumous reception. They knew I had studied how Hume and Smith, and Spinoza and his circle had organized this and we discussed it without shame. Wisdom is a meditation on life, Helen quoted. When Helen elicited from me a promise to curate a collection of their blog writings, they mentioned Eric Steinhart’s biographical text (see here at DailyNous). I said yes to their request not so much to honor our friendship, but primarily to give myself an excuse to re-read and trod their lively path, anew.

I am not ready to let go.

A single, slender breath sometimes no more than a sigh is the line between the living and our mortality. I often catch myself obliquely wondering if Spinoza felt a creeping doubt about his intellectual edifice. But I have no doubt that Helen’s vibrant, overflowing and infectuous intellectual joy exemplified his insight that the more one understands things the less one is acted on by affects which are evil, and the less one fears death.

May their memory be a blessing.