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A longtime faculty member of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Professor Machamer was perhaps best-known for his work on Galileo and on the concept of mechanism. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Machamer, or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.
I was in Peter's first class as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State in the year 1971-2, my first year in graduate school. Peter and Ron Laymon co-taught a seminar on philosophy of science that introduced me to Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos. It transformed my thinking about nearly everything. He was a great mentor as well as an outstanding philosopher. We had planned to meet this summer – so sad to see that he's gone.
Peter Machamer Remembrance June 2023
by Lindley Darden
Peter Machamer was a dear friend and I will miss him, especially the lively dinners when I visit Pittsburgh. Despite his foibles (sadly, he had many), his brilliance lighted the way for students and colleagues. Peter would toss out an (often half baked) idea that he or others turned into a real insight, resulting in important, much cited, work. In 1997, during a visit to the Pitt Center for Philosophy of Science I was struggling with what mechanism is, while reading about twenty possible mechanisms for adaptive mutation. I went to lunch with Peter in the Strip, where he knew folks who greeted him warmly and gave us delicious samples to try. I said to Peter: "What is a mechanism?" Unfortunately, I didn't write down his exact words, but his idea about activities sparked out collaboration with his grad student Carl Carver. In 2000, after much work and trips back and forth on the Penn turnpike, we published our much cited MDC paper: "Thinking about Mechanisms." At the last dinner we shared, we both exclaimed how unexpected the extensive reception of MDC has been. In 2017, it was a pleasure to attend the conference in his honor and review his festschrift: Eppur si muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer, A Collection of Essays in Honor of Peter Machamer. The Italian, "Eppur si muove," means "and yet it does move" and is (almost certainly apocryphally) attributed to Galileo after he was forced to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun. Peter was an accomplished Galileo scholar, since the time we both studied Galileo with our teacher at the University of Chicago, Dudley Shapere. Peter and I both became thorough HPS scholars, using the history of philosophy/science (not to be separated in the 17th C.) to address philosophical issues. Peter will be missed by his many friends around the world.
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