Sandra Luft was born Sandra Rudnick in Los Angeles on July 22, 1934 to Betty Rest and Morrie Rudnick. Her sister Daveen Faier was born a year and a half later. Morrie was a traveling salesman and the working-class family moved frequently in the LA area, though they considered the Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights home. Sandra, known in her first two decades as Sunny, discovered young her love of books and used to crawl under her bed to read. She frequently said that despite her parents not understanding her early intellectual interests, she always felt loved and supported by them. After graduating from Los Angeles High, she worked her way through an undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, inspired by Dr. Bill Bousma and Dr. Josephine Miles. She graduated in 1956 with a double major in Philosophy and English Literature, and went on to Brandeis University, a center of exhilarating and iconoclastic intellectual life, where she studied with Herbert Marcuse, receiving her Ph.D in the History of Ideas (1962). Applying to dozens of philosophy and other humanities departments for her first academic job, she received many rejections both for her continental approach to philosophy and her gender; at least one department sent a letter back saying they had never hired a woman and had no plans to start. In 1962 she was hired by the interdisciplinary Department of Humanities at what was then San Francisco State College, where she taught for 55 years. When she retired in 2017 at the age of 83, hers was the longest teaching tenure of anyone in the history of SFSU. An early postmodern thinker, her teaching and research emphasized the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt. It was a life-long passion for 18thcentury Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico that really defined her scholarship, and about whom she published a book, Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Between Modern and Postmodern in 2003. Her work was driven by a hermeneutic approach and what she called a poetic use of language, the verum/factum principle, and an anti-epistemological orientation. Decades of closely mentored students who went on to teach in fields from performances studies to sociology describe her as a devoted advocate who believed deeply in their intellectual capacities, taught them rigor in thinking and reading, and encouraged them to follow their own intellectual instincts. Despite her exacting intellect she was a generous and encouraging interlocutor. Sandra was a marvelous cook and baker and known for her warm and elegant hospitality. She loved to walk and to travel, especially to Italy, and she also loved daily life in her redwood forest in the Berkeley hills. Sandra had a stroke in 2021 and went to live with her daughter in Seattle. She was content in her final years and at peace, knowing she'd lived her life to the fullest and in just the way she wanted. She died on July 13, 2024, 9 days before her 90th birthday. She was preceded in death by her parents, her first husband, Joe Luft (d. 2014), and her sister, Daveen Faier (d. 2018). She is survived by her two children, Rachel E. Luft and Josh Luft, her former husband Rufus Browning, her four step-children (Marla Browning, Ross Browning, Charles Browning, and Mark Browning), 5 grandchildren by marriage whom she adored (Ryan Thiermann, Dylan Thiermann, Leo Browning, Sylvia Browning, John Chandler), and two nieces (Lieba Faier and Michele Faier). Donations in lieu of flowers can be made to the ACLU in Sandra's name: <https://action.aclu.org/give/now>