Honouring a Friend — Brendan Myers (1974–2026)

Two days ago, I lost a very dear friend. So did my friend's many friends all over the world. To say nothing of his bereaved siblings and parents, to whom I present once more, hereby, my deepest condolences. My friend's name — to my family and me here in Iceland — was, quite simply, "Brendan." Others, instead, knew him as "Dr Brendan Myers," professor at CEGEP Heritage College in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, i.e., the country where we had first met, on the eve of the new millennium, two graduate students at the University of Guelph, Ontario. More people knew him through his works and creations as a philosopher, a writer of fantasy and science-fiction novels, a board-game designer, a folk singer, and so much else. Brendan was a truly talented man, in many ways. And a good man too was he: sensitive, sensible, honest, and honourable. Besides, he possessed an amazing sense of humour, which he expressed most vigorously by way of a generous, contagious, roaring laughter. He was probably a baritone. It was a lovely sound.

Over the years, Brendan published numerous books, one of which has served as a reference textbook on logic and argumentation in a philosophy course of mine for almost a decade, i.e., Clear and Present Thinking. Another, entitled Reclaiming Civilization, has been one of the most urgent, insightful, well-informed, and hopeful takes on the ongoing climate crisis to be issued in recent years, and I have greatly admired it since he released it, back in 2016. Also, Brendan helped other thinkers and writers to publish their own works and creations through his imprint, Northwest Passage Books, which we were working hard to expand further together, drawing in new authors, assessing new projects, and launching new book series. Thus, last year, Brendan made his first visit to Akureyri, Iceland, for the launch of "Philosophical Fragments," of which there will probably exist now in print only the first volume, even if five more were ready and forthcoming — I can almost hear Brendan's resounding laughter at this editorial hiccup! It would be a lovely sound.

Brendan's imprint, as he told the audience gathered at the Municipal Library of Akureyri on that occasion, was born out of his grating frustration with standard academic publishing, which reflects the for-profit logic of corporate management and has clearly abandoned even the slightest commitment to pursuing any higher or deeper goals, such as Truth, Knowledge, Beauty, and Culture. Brendan, au contraire, was a man who believed in these values, and had no desire whatsoever to turn his back onto these, most certainly not for something so vile and destructive as accruing as much money as possible. As I stated, he was, among other things, a philosopher, and specifically one made of the same stern stuff as Socrates and Thomas More. But on top of that, he had the depth and nuance of feeling that characterised, say, Michel de Montaigne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge — or John McMurtry, whose passing we had honoured with a Festschrift published by Northwest Passage Books at the most affordable price possible: Because Brendan did not want to profit from it, but to make McMurtry's own philosophy known as far and as wide as he could help it to become.

There is no better way to provide a sample of Brendan's commitment and views than to end this note with his own words:

There is no standard style in philosophy because knowledge is more than “justified true belief”, the standard formula of Anglo-American thought. If that’s all it was, a prose essay could say everything on a given topic that needs to be said. The Oxford professor Derek Parfit says ‘the evening star’ can be reduced to ‘the planet Venus’ and that the reductionist account is the only account we need. But look at what he’s missing. Venus is a planet, to be sure; the evening star, by contrast, is a story. To take another example: moonlight is not just reflected sunlight. It’s the silver shafts of magic, filtering through bare branches of trees, on a brisk November night. It’s an audacious young boy sneaking out under cover of darkness to meet his lover, against their parents´ wills. It’s a circle of witches, calling up the gods. It’s legends and stories told around the fire. And ships lost at sea. And lonely desire.

So what is knowledge, when considered in that light? Knowledge is the unfolding of flowers, as the snow recedes in spring. It’s the sunrise in the morning, and the stars emerging from twilight. It’s the unwrapping of a Christmas gift, it’s the birth of a child, turning the pages of a book, and turning on the light. Knowledge is aletheia; an old Greek term for un-covering, disclosing, revealing. It is the thing that emerges from darkness and into visibility, the thing that grows out of silence and becomes music. Logic and Systematic Reason, the method we use to pursue this aletheia: sure it has to do with Boolean operators, truth tables, and Venn diagrams. But those instruments are only for facilitating precision and eliminating errors. At its heart, Reason is organized curiosity. It starts with aporia and confusion, it continues through struggle and courage, it ends with invention and discovery. From there it can go to more aporia, and from there to more discovery. It is not mere description and calculation; it is more important than that. It is imagination, it is adventure, it is ambition, it is wonder, it is joy, it is love, it is life.

And I want to publish books by people who remember that.

Picture: The photograph was taken by Rachael Lorna Johnstone at the Municipal Library of Akureyri, November 2025. Brendan had told me that he loved it.