Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Structural realism's avatar
  2. Siddharth Muthukrishnan's avatar
  3. V. Alan White's avatar
  4. jason Yackee's avatar
  5. a bit off topic's avatar
  6. s. wallerstein's avatar
  7. David Wallace's avatar

In Memoriam: Howard Stein (1929-2024)

Brian Leiter

Well-known for his work in philosophy of science and physics, Professor Stein was emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1980 to 2000, after also teaching at Columbia and Case Western Universities.  There is an evocative memorial from one of his former students, Eric Schliesser, here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Stein or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

7 responses to “In Memoriam: Howard Stein (1929-2024)”

  1. Jim Holt

    I was a graduate student at Columbia shortly before Howard Stein left the department for U. Chicago in 1980. I mainly remember his invaluable performances at colloquia, where he made the question periods come alive. He had an awesome clarity of thought like his colleague Charles Parsons, and an irrepressible intellectual exuberance like his colleague Isaac Levi–plus a vocal timbre that somehow conveyed amused irony. I remember him once telling a philosophy graduate student that you could get a lot out of reading hard physics articles even if you couldn't follow all the mathematics. He said this with genuine humility, so I naively assumed it was his own m.o. as a philosopher of physics. Years later, I learned that Stein himself had refuted the Nobel laureate Chandrasekhar's mathematical objection to Gödel's rotating-universe solution to Einstein's field equations (which showed that time travel was compatible with general relativity).

    Reply
  2. Allen Hazen

    I occasionally (I lived in New York at one time) sat in on Columbia philosophy colloquia: let me second Jim Holt's comment on his performance in question periods.
    —
    One story. At some colloquium, the Quine ("Two dogmas") – Carnap ("Empiricism, semantics, and ontology") debate was mentioned. Stein had been present when Quine had spoken, with Carnap in th audience. After some back and forth, Stein recalled, the two had agreed that the difference between them was a "pragmatic" matter. (And — advice to graduate students attending seminars with the famous — I wish I had taken notes so I could give the precise wording of Stein's report!)

    Reply
  3. Steve Sverdlik

    I remember that same colloquium, which I attended as a grad student! My recollection is that Stein was recounting how Carnap responded when Quine presented the "Two Dogmas" paper at Chicago, where Carnap was teaching. Stein reported that Carnap's first response to Quine was in the form of a question. How, Carnap asked, would Quine's position promote scientific inquiry?

    Reply
  4. David Malament

    It was always a source of wonder and amusement to me how carefully Howard read everything. It did not matter if it was a fragment from the Presocratics, a disputed passage in Newton's Principia, an undergraduate term paper, an article in the New York Review of Books, or a menu in a restaurant. Indeed, eating dinner with Howard at a restaurant could be a trial, a wonderful trial, because he could not possibly decide what to order without first reading through the entire menu slowly, page by page, line and by line. If it was a Chinese restaurant, then, of course, he would take time to see if he could find a common character in the names (or descriptions?) of different chicken dishes.

    Howard's careful reading (and great erudition) are on exhibit in the many letters he sent to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. I have posted two here.

    https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/malament/howard-stein-letters/

    Readers interested in Howard's account of that exchange between Quine and Carnap (mentioned in other comments) can find an extended discussion in his paper "Was Carnap Entirely Wrong, After All?"

    http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/stein-was-carnap-entirely-wrong.pdf

    Reply
  5. Stathis Psillos

    Bill Harper was kind enough to remind me of a comment I had made in 2018 when we discussed Howard’s remarkable contributions to understanding scientific practice.

    "Howard Stein has the unique philosophical capacity to turn into gold whatever topic he chooses to work on. There is no single piece he has written which has not changed the way we think about the topic it is on. From the papers on Newton to the papers on Carnap to the papers on realism, he has always managed to cast new and fresh light on old problems and to make us see them from a different and novel point of view. His diversity is exemplary—without compromising depth. His ability to combine solid philosophical argument with historical accuracy and detail is unparalleled. Thanks to him we have come to re-think about Newton’s method and its relation to metaphysics; Poincare’s conventions; and the Carnap-Quine debate about analyticity, to name but a few."

    Reply
  6. Allen Hazen

    I was nervous about posting my very vague recollection of Howard's report, at a Columbia seminar, of a Quine-Carnap encounter, but now it seems to have been worth while, because it elicited valuable comments. Thank you Steve Sverdlik, and thank you David Malement, particularly for posting the link to Howard's paper!!

    Reply
  7. Chris Smeenk

    Howard was remarkably generous in the few face-to-face interactions we had, and in correspondence. Zvi Biener and I gave a commentary on Howard's "Newton: Philosophy of Inquiry and Metaphysics of Nature" at the APA Central meeting in 2004. We approached this task with some trepidation. We both admired Howard's work enormously, but were well aware of his penchant for trenchant criticism of other Newton scholars. We were not sure what to expect when we sent the draft of our comments to Howard. What followed was easily the most detailed, thorough, and insightful criticism I have received on anything I have written. Furthermore, his tone was always one that invited us to join in the scholarly work of interpreting Newton, while his comments exemplified a particular way of doing it.

    But the correspondence is also memorable for Howard's jeremiads regarding grammar and diction. One of these was prompted by our misuse of "fortuitous," to mean lucky or fortunate, rather than accidental, random, or by chance. This prompted Howard to acknowledge that we were in good company in (mis)using fortuitous in this sense, but to encourage us to join in his quixotic quest to avoid a kind of semantic drift, which he described as a casual smudging of meaning. Here is a passage from the ensuing (lengthy) discussion that reflects Howard's penchant for close reading, as well as his distinctive and exuberant voice:

    "I've said that one bad effect of this casual use of words is a loss of understanding of older literature; and I said that I'd offer an amusing example from Newton translation. I think, actually, that the example is hilarious. It occurs twice, and concerns the phrase "to use to [do something]." Nowadays, one never says "I use to do X"; and for a very good reason. What the phrase means–or meant–should be pretty clear, if one stops to think: it means "to have the doing of X as one's usage"–i.e., as one's practice–to do X habitually, or customarily, or regularly. But there's an obvious inconvenience about the phrase: the present tense, "use to," and the past tense, "used to," sound exactly the same, unless the past tense is pronounced with a kind of affected precision. And at the same time, there's just about no real need for the present tense: why say, "I use to do my grocery shopping on Tuesday," when you can just as well–and just as informatively–say, "I do my weekly grocery shopping on Tuesday." But the past tense is quite useful: "I used to shop on Tuesday"–efficiently conveying the facts that (a) I did so regularly in the past, but (b) I don't any longer. So everyone knows what "used to" means–and nobody knows what "use to" does (or could possibly) mean. Consequence–even in "learned" circles–if one sees the phrase, one concludes that it must be either a mistake, or a quaint old spelling of "used to". And here is the result: Andrew Motte translated Newton as saying, in the last paragraph of Bk. I, Section IX: "… [T]hose authors who treat of the motion of heavy bodies use to consider the ascent and descent of such bodies, not only in a perpendicular direction, but at all degrees of obliquity upon any given planes"; and he translated the second sentence of the next-to-last paragraph of the General Scholium as saying that the cause of gravity "operates not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts (as mechanical causes use to do) …". Both those passages, in Cajori's edition, read "used to" where Motte had "use to"; one wonders why the authors no longer treat the subject in that way–but that's at least imaginable; but what in the world could have induced "mechanical causes" to change the way they act? Is this the result of a process of evolution in accordance with the divine plan?"

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

    Reply

Designed with WordPress