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Thanks, I’ll check it out!
A longtime member of the philosophy faculties at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he was emeritus, Professor Koslow wrote widely in philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and logic. He died last month. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Koslow or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.
(Thanks to Mark Zelcer for the pointer.)
I took a class on philosophy of knowledge at Brooklyn College in my difficult youth. He had a way of making the subject simple. The class once bought lottery tickets he marked off on the chalkboard in a way that everyone jointly onwed every ticket purchased. We did not hit the jackpot, but, surpise, philosophy was fun!
Arnie was a brilliant polymath and devoted teacher, who was warm, punny, and generous. By the time I knew him, he was Professor Emeritus at CUNY's Graduate Center, giving graduate seminars that were in general philosophy of science,, where he covered material that was contemporary — Bas van Fraassen on scientific representation, Marc Lange on scientific explanations, Mark Wilson on scientific concepts, etc. — but where the scope of coverage stretched way back to relatively neglected figures, who sprang to life in his teaching.
In this way, and with great erudition, he could employ, say, Ramsey's criticism of Russell's propositional functions as a cudgel against Armstrong's account of laws. (For details, see Arnie's (final) monograph, Laws and Explanations: Theories and Modal Possibilities, chs. 5 – 6 (Springer, 2019)). His knowledge of culture, history, philosophy, and science was awesome. And he drew on this to yield very surprising and insightful results like the connection between apparently unconnected things — like the foregoing link between Ramsey's criticism of Russell's non-extensional propositional functions and Armstrong's notion of laws and how it can't straightforwardly express the identity of particulars.
In Arnie's work, philosophical models of scientific explanation need to be fit for use in application to actual scientific theories. (His focus was, however, general, and not concentrated in any special science or physics itself.) His oeuvre was very concerned with the idea of how some theories can possess logical and mathematical structure whilst standing on their own bottoms as what he termed schematic theories, where the origins of schematic theories lie in Hilbert's axiomatic structures, as in geometry, where Hilbert managed to put his correspondent Frege into a rage. This relates to a distinction drawn in Arnie's paper with Morgenbesser ('Theories and Their Worth', J. Phil, 2010), which (inter alia) distinguishes theories-of and theories-for. In this way of going about scientific theorizing, where we have a theory that's, by their lights, not used in explanation of prediction of its successes. (They submitted that Hamilton's least action principle in mechanics is such an account. So, too, are the germ theory of disease and the kinetic theory of gases.) A theory-for is a structure that systematizes certain results, and presents them in elegant fashion, but without service as essential premise in successful explanations or predictions. His studies of structuralist logic spoke to how much logical operators on an implication-relation can behave in ways where it's understandable to characterize them as extralogical apparatuses, but they're in truth familiar logical operators (disjunction, conjunction, negation) under a different guise, e.g., the mereological operators on a mereological implication-structure are just the familiar logical operators. He excelled at revealing the deep, hidden structure of things in a rigorous way.
Dear Howard,
Thank you so much for sharing your memory of my dad. I'm grateful.
best
Jen Koslow
Dear Cosim,
Thank you for sharing your memories of my dad and his research. I'm very grateful for these words.
best
Jen Koslow, his daughter
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