Robert Holmes’ education began in a northern New York state one-room country schoolhouse. Though his parents died during his teen years and were not college graduates, they had nurtured in him an abiding love of learning, music and sports.

Holmes graduated from Watertown High School in 1953 where he was editor of the school magazine and president of the student council. He was a sectional wrestling champion as well as captain of a sectional championship cross country team.  

While in school, Holmes also studied classical piano for ten years at the Watertown Conservatory of Music and won awards in piano competitions in New York City, Canada and Washington, DC.  During high school, he performed frequently in the Watertown community.

At Harvard on scholarship, Holmes majored in philosophy, ran cross country and worked part-time for four years.  He also took up long distance running and finished 27th in the Boston Marathon.

He graduated from Harvard with honors in 1957 and went on to earn his M.A. (1959) and PhD (1961) in philosophy from the University of Michigan.

Harvard, A.B. Philosophy cum laude, Honors thesis:  Plato’s Concept of God, 1957. 

University of Michigan, M.A. (1959), PhD Philosophy (1961). Dissertation: John Dewey’s Ethics in the Light of Contemporary Metaethical Theory.

Much of my early teaching and writing was in mainstream academic philosophy, particularly metaethics.   But the growing nuclear threat (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and the problem of war itself (epitomized by Vietnam) soon became my overriding moral concerns. These drew me to grass-roots activism and eventually to politics.  I ran for Congress as a peace candidate in 1968 and chaired a reform political organization in 1969. Realizing that my philosophical training did not have to run a separate course from my now compelling moral concerns, I brought the analytical skills of philosophy to bear on the problem of war.  Sensing the deficiency of my immersion in Western thought (with its heavy emphasis on political realism in foreign affairs), I turned to the works of Gandhi as well as Eastern philosophy, especially the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita.  These works, along with my study of Tolstoy and Martin Luther King, Jr., opened my eyes to a way of thinking that was largely foreign to mainstream Western thought.

I began to see philosophy, as the ancients viewed it, as love of wisdom, which can be encouraged but not taught.  Indeed, I began to think of education itself -- and particularly the mission of universities -- as the encouragement of learning rather than simply the imparting of knowledge, as though education were a commodity and students simply consumers. 

With the Cold War in full-swing, I sought first-hand knowledge of the Soviet Union through a Fulbright lectureship in Moscow in 1983. With conflict between Israelis and Palestinians worsening, I spent three weeks in the Middle East in 1985 with a small group of Jewish and non-Jewish activists, better to understand the complexities of those issues; and later served 9 years on the board of the Foundation for Democratic Education in Israel. Though not a Quaker, I was influenced by the Quaker Peace Testimony, and served for six years on two boards of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).  I also served six years on the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the oldest faith-based anti-war group in the U.S.

On the academic front, I began teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses on Morality and War and inaugurated an undergraduate course on the Philosophy, History and Practice of Nonviolence. Some students from the latter course formed an organization called Nonviolent on Campus and held what was (so far as is known) the first undergraduate conference on nonviolence anywhere. 

Having become friends with Arun Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi), I drafted a proposal to affiliate his M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence with the University of Rochester, which was approved in 2006.  The Institute moved to Rochester in 2007.

In brief, my most serious education began only after graduate school, when I came to see education, music and fitness as ingredients in a good life and peace as a condition of such a life for everyone. Later I came to see nonviolence as central to any realistic hope of achieving a sustainable world peace. That belief has become my governing conviction, and I have sought to promote it as widely as possible. 

Teaching and Research:

University of Rochester, Assistant, Associate and Full Professor,  1962-2009.

St. Bonaventure University, Lenna Endowed Visiting Professor. February-March, 2012.

Hamilton College, McCullough Distinguished Visiting Professor of Political Philosophy, Fall 2009.

Moscow, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, member of core faculty in program on the teaching of ethics for younger philosophy faculty from Russia and the former Russian Republics: Golitsino, Russia (Summer 2004) and Debroye, Russia (Summer, 2005).

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. First recipient of the Rajiv Gandhi Chair in Peace and Disarmament, 1998-99.

East Carolina University, Distinguished Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities, School of Medicine, 1994.

Notre Dame University, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Fellow, 1991.

Moscow State University, USSR, Ethics Faculty, Senior Fulbright Lecturer, 1983.

Hamilton College (Truax Professor), Winter term of 1980.

Yale University, National Humanities Institute, Fellow, 1976-77.

University of Illinois, Institute for Advanced Studies, Fellow, 1970-71.

University of Michigan, Visiting Associate Professor, Summers of 1967 and 1969.

University of Texas (Austin), Instructor, 1961-62.

University of Michigan, Pre-doctoral Instructor, 1960-61.

Editorial:

Editor, Public Affairs Quarterly, 1995-1999

Editorial Advisory Board, The Acorn: Journal of the Gandhi-King Society. 1990-2003.

Editorial Advisory Board, Social Theory and Practice, 1975-1995.

Board of Editors, series on Contemporary Russian Philosophy, Value Inquiry Book Series, Rodopi Press (1999 – present)

Other:

President, Concerned Philosophers for Peace, 1992.

Chairman, New Democratic Coalition, Genesee Valley Region, 1969.

Candidate for Congress (House of Representatives), 1968.

Professor Holmes speaks at schools, colleges and places of worship. He has lectured and taught mini-courses on Nonviolence, Affirmative Action, Communism and Capitalism, Sexism, and Antisemitism at The Highlands, a University of Rochester-affiliated senior living complex in Pittsford, NY.

Holmes gives private piano recitals at home and has performed piano as a volunteer at a Rochester nursing home and at the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence. He performed on the program at the University of Rochester philosophy diploma ceremonies for many years.

In 2007, Holmes was instrumental in affiliating the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence with the University of Rochester and helped guide the Institute during its first years in Rochester.  Holmes had long known its founders, Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and his wife Sunanda, through mutual worldwide nonviolence work.  Nearly twenty years later, the Institute today still serves University of Rochester students, local school children, and the wider Rochester community with nonviolence workshops, hands-on and online activities, as well as nonviolence-focused programs in nearby prisons.