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When a New Jersey boy named Isidore Gewirtz was 11, other children in the schoolyard called him "Dizzy Izzy."

So he went home and announced to his parents that he was changing his name to Alan, after a character whom "he admired as a fearless man of the people" from Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped," said his wife, Jean Laves.

That determination with intellectual underpinnings was a sign of things to come for Alan Gewirth, a prominent University of Chicago philosopher who rejected the relativist theories of his times and espoused a universal ethical system with scientific precision.

"In an age increasingly characterized by relativism in moral philosophy and skepticism about the powers of reason generally, Alan Gewirth's writings propounded an uncompromising rationalism," said Deryck Beyleveld, professor of jurisprudence at the University of Sheffield in England and author of a book on Mr. Gewirth's ethical philosophy.

Mr. Gerwith, 91, died of congestive heart failure after complications from colon cancer Sunday, May 9, in his Hyde Park home.

"He was a man who was enormously involved in his work," said his wife. "It was a mission for him."

In that mission, he earned much acclaim. He was named the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the U. of C. philosophy department and elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, among other honors.

Mr. Gewirth's father, a paperhanger who had dreamed of becoming a concert violinist, started teaching his son to play violin while still a toddler. Before he reached his teens, Mr. Gewirth began teaching violin to younger students in his family's apartment.

His academic prowess also took shape at a young age. He was valedictorian and editor of the yearbook in 1930 at Memorial High School in West New York, N.J. He also wrote and starred in the senior play.

At Columbia University, where he was concertmaster of the university's orchestra, Mr. Gewirth was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year. He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and went on to graduate study at Columbia and Cornell University. He then did research and taught at the U. of C. before being drafted into the Army in 1942.

For part of his four years in the service, he was the education officer at Walter Reed Army Hospital. He was discharged with the rank of captain.

In 1947, he received a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia and returned to the U. of C., where he taught such future intellectual luminaries as Susan Sontag and Richard Rorty.

Mr. Gewirth, who wrote seven books and hundreds of articles, devised the Principle of Generic Consistency, according to which all "agents," or human beings, have inalienable rights to the capacities and facilities they need to be able to act at all or with general chances of success. That evolved into the belief that self-interest and the good of the community are not opposed but mutually supportive and, later, an optimism, not based on religious faith, that human capacity can overcome evil.

"He helped people from many different fields understand why rights are so important and why social economic rights must be included alongside civil and political rights," said Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the U. of C. Law School.

Though he was a demanding person who was very goal-oriented, Mr. Gewirth also was kind to others, his wife said. Recently, while ill, he wrote a letter to help a young student return to DePaul University after she was forced to interrupt her doctoral studies.

Mr. Gewirth married Janet Adams in 1942; they were divorced in 1954. Two years later, he married Marcella Tilton, who died in 1992.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1996, he is survived by three sons, James, Andrew and Daniel; two daughters, Susan Kumar and Letitia Naigles; a stepson, Benjamin Hellie; a brother, Nathaniel Gage; and five grandchildren.

Services have been held.

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