Ellery Eells (1953 - 2006).  Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, until his untimely death on August 10, 2006, at the age of 52.  He is survived by his wife, Joanne Tillinghast, son Justin, daughter Erika, father Thomas Eells, as well as three brothers and two sisters.
 
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Ellery completed all his education in California.  First he went to Santa Barbara to study philosophy and mathematics, graduating as Outstanding Graduating Senior in Philosophy in 1975.  After that, he moved further north to the University of California, Berkeley, to earn a PhD in philosophy in 1980.  Except for a one-year visiting position at North Carolina State University, Ellery's entire working career was spent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from 1980 to the present.
 
Ellery first gained major recognition in philosophy from his book, Rational Decision and Causality (Cambridge University Press).  The book was published in 1982 at the height of the uproar over Newcomb-style counterexamples to Bayesian decision theory.  In it, Ellery developed the entirely novel argument that Bayesian decision theory can produce the same answers as the new causal decision theory so long as deliberation is viewed as a dynamical process.  Besides spear-heading this new line of research in decision theory, his work rekindled interest in old questions about the relationship between causality and probability.  The paper he published with Elliott Sober in 1983, called "Probabilistic Causality and the Question of Transitivity" is still widely cited in this area.  Finally, this culminated in a major treatise called Probabilistic Causality in 1991.  In the meantime, he was publishing numerous papers in confirmation theory; perhaps the best known is "Problems of Old Evidence", which first appeared in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in 1985.  It has been reprinted twice since then.
 
Ellery won the American Philosophical Association's Franklin J. Matchette Prize for his book on probabilistic causality in 1995, after already receiving a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an ACLS award, and numerous awards from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  More recently, he was elected to the Governing Board of the Philosophy of Science Association.  He has always been tireless in his service to the philosophy of science community, especially behind the scenes.  For example, he normally wrote more than ten reviews and referee reports per year.  His life was dedicated to philosophy.

To those who knew him personally, Ellery was a kind and gentle person, with a quiet but cheerful demeanor.  Academically, had an unparalleled patience for details, which shows up very clearly in his published work.  (He once told me that he had never had a paper rejected for publication!)  His patience made him popular amongst the graduate students and colleagues who sought his expertise, and equally amongst those who were novices in his field.  Ellery was the person with whom you'd want to share committee work; he was hard-working and reliable, and would always have copious notes.  When serving on the admissions committee, for instance, Ellery was always able to summarize the best points of every candidate.  He was always looking for the good in everyone.  I feel privileged to have been his colleague, and his friend.

A memorial session for Ellery Eells has been organized for the Pacific APA meetings, San Francisco, April 2007.  The National Taipei University of Technology is opening a new research center called the Ellery Eells Memorial Center for Philosophy of Science and Professional Ethics.
 
Malcolm Forster, University of Wisconsin-Madison.