Larry Sklar recently passed away in Ann Arbor at the age of 86. He was among the foremost philosophers of science of our time.
Larry received a BA from Oberlin College and an MA and a PhD from Princeton. He was an Assistant Professor at Swarthmore (1965–1966) and at Princeton (1966–1968). He joined the university of Michigan as an Associate Professor of Philosophy in 1968 and retired in 2016 as Carl G. Hempel and William K. Frankena Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. He held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, UCLA, and Wayne State University.
Larry was the author of six books, roughly two hundred articles, and an astounding 672 brief notices in Mathematical Reviews. When one thinks of the means by which Anglophone philosophers are honored, Sklar has been, received, given, or held just about all of them: President of the American Philosophical Association, President of the Philosophy of Science Association, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Matchette Prize, the Lakatos Award, the Locke Lectures, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Larry combined to an unparalleled degree the desire and ability to write about his subject clearly and accessibly with a magisterial understanding of many disparate scientific fields and with a searching philosophical intellect. He provided readers with detailed and illuminating maps of difficult terrain in which empirical, conceptual, and mathematical considerations are often entangled with each other. He seldom seemed interested in settling philosophical debates. Rather, in most of his work, he aimed to make progress in philosophy by clarifying the questions at hand, by investigating the dialectical resources available to partisans of various positions, and by highlighting the extent to which apparently compelling appeals to empirical and mathematical considerations usually also rely crucially on underlying philosophical commitments.
Larry wrote many influential articles—anyone’s list of highlights would probably include “Methodological Conservativism,” “Do Unborn Hypotheses Have Rights?,” “Saving the Noumena,” “Up and Down, Left and Right, Past and Future,” and “Inertia, Gravitation, and Metaphysics.” In the last half-century, generations of philosophy students have been introduced to the philosophy of space and time through Larry’s first book, the Matchette Prize-winning Space, Time, and Spacetime—a classic that remains essential reading for experts in this field. His later book, the Lakatos Award-winning Physics and Chance, plays a similar foundational role for students and scholars pursuing philosophical questions about statistical physics. A third masterpiece, Theory and Truth (based on Larry’s Locke Lectures) stands out as perhaps the most serious philosophical attempt to explicate what it means to adopt a realist attitude towards physical theories when one takes seriously the fact that our current best theories are both astonishingly accurate in their predictions and almost certainly false.
During his long career at Michigan and into his retirement, Larry was a vital presence in the department. Most days, he would carom from one end of the corridor to the other, seeking out staff members, students, and colleagues to let them know what was on his mind (the popular semi-regular dinners that he organized in Chinese restaurants served the same purpose). Since Larry’s mind was nothing if not tenacious, someone on his route might well hear much the same thing from day to day. But on a longer time-scale they could expect to learn about an astonishing range of topics, since Larry’s famously prodigious memory was matched by his insatiable and wide-ranging curiosity. In a typical month, Larry might have illuminating things to say about any number of current and historical debates in philosophy and in physics, about the films he had been watching (perhaps, early works of W.C. Fields and of Bong Joon-ho), about the monetary and political predicaments of an array of countries across the world, about conversations he had had decades ago (often, those with his teacher Peter Hempel or his friend and former colleague Jaegwon Kim), and about the accomplishments of his wife Elizabeth, of their daughter Jessica, and of his (now deceased) brother Richard.
He will be sorely missed.
Gordon Belot
Lawrence Sklar Collegiate Professor of Philosophy
