About Martin Gerwin

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Martin  was born in England in 1940. His father was a German journalist who was  working in London in the years before the Second World War; his mother  was an elementary school teacher and a native Londoner who had a  life-long interest in Waldorf education. After the war, Martin’s father  Edgar Gerwin was chosen to be a member of the team of diplomats who  would open the first embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany (“West  Germany”) in Canada. (It helped that he had never taken out a membership  in the Nazi party.) So the family moved to Canada when Martin was 11  years old, and after that he grew up in Ottawa, the capital city of  Canada. He became a Canadian citizen in 1964. His parents persuaded him  to return to England for two years in order to have some of his  secondary education at a Waldorf school – Michael Hall, in Forest Row,  Sussex. After that he attended Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario,  graduating with a B.A. (Honours) degree in philosophy in 1962. He was a  graduate student at Princeton University from 1962 to 1965, leaving with  a completed Master’s degree and an unfinished Ph.D. dissertation. The  very different dissertation that eventually earned him a Ph.D. from  Princeton, 20 years later, contains the early version of major parts of  his book Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will. 

In  1964 Martin married Elma Beall, who had also grown up in Ottawa. (They  had even been in the same high school for two years, but had never  become acquainted because she was in the grade above him.) In 1965 he  and Elma relocated to Winnipeg, where Martin had been offered a faculty  position at the University of Manitoba. They liked the idea of “trying  out Manitoba for a couple of years”, but it turned into a job for life.  Their three children -- John, Beth, and James -- were all born in  Winnipeg, but all left to pursue careers elsewhere. Martin and Elma were  making plans to spend their retirement in Toronto when Elma developed  cancer and died at the age of 62. One of the letters of condolence that  Martin received came from an old friend Judith Rutledge, whom he had  known in honours philosophy classes at Queen’s 40 years earlier. They  had had no romantic relationship when they were students, but romance  blossomed when they were both about to retire. So in 2003 Martin had  retirement, remarriage and relocation, all in one summer. Since then he  and Judith have lived happily in Toronto. Between the two of them they  have seven grown children and 11 grandchildren.