Name Adolf Grunbaum Role Philosopher | ||
 | ||
Books The Foundations of Psycho, Philosophical Problems of Space, Geometry and Chronom, Validation in the Clinical T, Collected Works - Volume I | ||
Mein fuhrer adolf grunbaum ist nicht mehr verfugbar
Adolf Grünbaum (born May 15, 1923, Cologne, Germany) is a philosopher of science and a critic of psychoanalysis. He is also well known as a critic of Karl Popper's philosophy of science. He became the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1960, where he continues to teach and is Co-Chairman of its Center for Philosophy of Science (since 1978), Research Professor of Psychiatry (since 1979), and Primary Research Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (since 2006).
Contents
- Mein fuhrer adolf grunbaum ist nicht mehr verfugbar
- Grnbaum Memorial May 11 2019
- Life and career
- Philosophical work
- Festschriften
- References
Grünbaum Memorial May 11 2019
Life and career
Grünbaum received a B.A. with twofold High Distinction in Philosophy and in Mathematics from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut in 1943. He obtained both his M.S. in physics (1948) and his Ph.D in philosophy (1951) from Yale University.
He was a chaired professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1956–1960), after rising through the ranks there, starting in 1950, becoming a full professor in 1955.
In the fall of 1960, Grünbaum left Lehigh University to join the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, where he became the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy. In that year, he also became the founding Director of that University's Center for Philosophy of Science, serving as Director until 1978. He and the colleagues he recruited then built world-class Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science Departments at the university. Several of these colleagues had come from Yale University's Philosophy Department, starting in 1962. During this recruitment period the University of Pittsburgh appointed Nicholas Rescher, Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Gale, Nuel Belnap, Alan Ross Anderson, and Gerald Massey, among others.
In 2003, Grünbaum resigned from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, while retaining his lifetime tenured Mellon Chair and all of his other affiliations at that university.
Grünbaum served as President of both the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) and the Philosophy of Science Association (two terms). He was the director of the Center for Philosophy of Science from 1960 to 1978. He was the president of the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS) in 2004–2005 and then automatically became president of the IUHPS from 2006 to 2007. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He has received the Senior U.S. Scientist Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany, 1985), the Fregene Prize for science from the Italian Parliament (1998) and the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal for outstanding achievement from Yale University (1990). Also, in May 1995, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Konstanz in Germany and, in 2013, an honorary doctorate of philosophy from the University of Cologne in Germany. In 2013, he received the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz from the Federal Republic of Germany.
Grünbaum is Jewish.
Philosophical work
Grünbaum is often viewed as part of the American brand of logical empiricism, associated especially with Hans Reichenbach.
Grünbaum did not embrace the prevailing -- especially among physical scientists -- Popperian philosophy of science, leading to some notoriety in the 1960s after he was ridiculed in print by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman. A much-quoted exchange followed Grünbaum's neo-Leibnizian suggestion that the steady flow of time might be an illusion only in conscious entities, in which Feynman asked whether dogs, then cockroaches, were sufficiently conscious entities. Reportedly as a mark of further disdain, Feynman refused to let his name be printed, becoming instead the easily recognizable "Mr. X".
Some 40 years later, writer Jim Holt would characterize Grünbaum as, in the 1950s, "the foremost thinker about the subtleties of space and time," and as, by the 2000s, "arguably the greatest living philosopher of science." Holt portrays a rationalist Grünbaum who rejects any hint of mysteriousness in the cosmos (a "great rejector").
He is the author of nearly 400 articles and book chapters as well as books on space-time and the critique of psychoanalysis, which include:
Festschriften
Three celebratory books ("Festschrift" volumes) dealing with his work have been published to date: