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In Memoriam: Lawrence Sklar (1938-2024)

Brian Leiter

Professor Sklar, who was emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he spent most of his career, died last year.  He was a leading contributor to the philosophy of science and physics, but he was remarkably erudite about almost everything in philosophy (including even phenomenology).  He joined the Michigan faculty in 1968, after brief stints teaching at Swarthmore and Princeton, where he took his PhD.  The Michigan memorial notice is here, and it captures him well!  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Sklar, or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.  I'll add my own recollections in the coming days.

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10 responses to “In Memoriam: Lawrence Sklar (1938-2024)”

  1. Adam Rigoni

    I was his student as an undergraduate and a graduate student. Larry was wonderful, and incredibly willing to in help students (like me) without a background in science understand the big questions in phil physics. And he talked to everybody.

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  2. Jim Holt

    Sklar's "Space, Time, and Spacetime" came out in 1977, just when I was graduating from the University of Virginia. I was taken with everything about Sklar's book–the depth of the themes, the lucid engagement with mathematics and physics, the elegant cerulean cover. Then, one evening during an ice storm that cut off power to our house, the phone rang in the darkness. It was "Larry" Sklar himself on the line, with a word of encouragement to come to grad school at Michigan. For me, it was like getting a call from Marlon Brando or Ringo Starr. And the guy was so easy, so friendly, so nice! Well, I didn't go to Michigan, and I never met Sklar in the flesh. But I've re-read him endlessly in the decades since, with huge profit and pleasure. ("Saving the Noumena" stands out.) Even on the page, the man was just irresistibly likable.

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  3. V. Alan White

    Along with Jim Holt above, my own published work on time was influenced greatly by Professor Sklar, turning it from a more metaphysical slant to one rooted in the physics of spacetime, though I never met him. As clear and empirically informed on the topics as one could be. That's quite a legacy.

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  4. AcademicLurker

    Not a philosopher, but a physicist. I found Sklar's "Physics and Chance" interesting and engaging. Quantum mechanics tends to get the lion's share of attention from philosophers. It was nice to see someone from outside the field taking a look at statistical physics and thermodynamics.

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  5. Jason Stanley

    I spent four years teaching at Michigan from 2000-4 with Larry as my colleague. When I first met Larry, I congratulated him on having recently given the John Locke lectures at Oxford. With a look of disgust, he waved his hand and replied, "that's nothing. I finished third in my class at Stuyvesant High School." With a deep and abiding love of Chinese food, arguing, and complaining, Larry was a quintessential New York Jew. As a colleague, Larry had distinctive habits. He would arrive very early in the morning at his office to write (he was so frightened of writer's block that he would write every morning, usually mathematical reviews). Finishing up at around 10 am, he would wander up and down the hallways looking for someone to argue with, which was more often than not, me. He shared the grouchiness of my later colleague Jerry Fodor, especially when he heard what philosophers in my areas were up to in their work. We disagreed politically, and enjoyed doing so. During my time there, he always appeared but participated only reluctantly in departmental meetings, including hiring meetings, never weighing in on fields outside his own (for better or for worse, I've taken him as something of a model in this regard). I remember those years at Michigan with enormous fondness, and I can't imagine Angell Hall at the University of Michigan without Larry wandering its corridors looking to complain to someone about something (or Louis Loeb regularly appearing at my office door to shout, "get to work!"). He will be missed.

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  6. Dave Baker

    Larry was my undergraduate professor, and then later my colleague. From a student's perspective I can add that he was an incredible pedagogue, with a natural classroom persona, and clear, snappy explanations of tough concepts always ready to hand. This mirrored the virtues of his writing, which led to his entry in the old Philosophical Lexicon saying that his name was a contraction of "sehr klar" (very clear). I will always be thankful that I had him to introduce me to philosophy of physics.

    Jason's reminiscences strike a chord with me, as they will with anyone who knew Larry. Philosophy was his job, but the man lived for Chinese food. At the time of his pre-retirement fest there were two excellent authentic Chinese restaurants in Ann Arbor, and the dinners were a cornucopia of all his favorite things. The fest also seemed to bring out his philosophical energy, and one had the feeling that he must have sunk his teeth into debates in a similarly energetic way during his prolific early career.

    He was very fond of complaining about his health, which he did with humor and sincere concern at the same time. He definitely would have made a good Woody Allen character.

    It was clear the last couple times we coaxed him out for dinner that he was slowing down, but happily he made it long enough to see Gordon Belot invested as the Lawrence Sklar Collegiate Professor at UM. Some of Larry's favorite philosophy friends were in town that night, it was great to see.

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  7. Alex Miller

    The first course I took when I started graduate school in Ann Arbor in September 1989 was the formal logic paper that was a candidacy requirement, and it was taught by Larry. In year 2 I was his TA for the course. I remember he struck me as what I had expected of a leading US university professor: brilliant, maybe a bit of a loose cannon, denim-clad and of slightly dishevelled appearance (in a different way from UK professors!). At the very end of graduate school in 1995, Larry very generously stood in for Gideon Rosen at my defense (Gideon has already left for Princeton) and I got the sense that he was a little bemused by the topic (Wittgenstein on rules) but that he still enjoyed the occasion. His politics were towards the opposite end of the spectrum from mine, but that didn't bother me: I found him to be a genuinely warm man, and I enjoyed talking to him in the common room in Angell Hall.

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  8. Peter Ludlow

    I was colleagues with Larry from 2002 to 2007 at Michigan. He was one of the most fun and helpful colleagues I ever had.

    I never could figure out when Larry got all his work done. It must have been very early in the morning because by the time I got to my office at around 10 AM he was done working. For the rest of the morning, he would wander the halls buttonholing whoever he could and discussing whatever was on his mind, whether that was his brother or politics or the geniuses he went to high school with or the relationship between earthquakes and tsunamis. Then, around noon, he would come by my office and twist my arm into going to lunch – usually for Chinese food, but not always. The Chinese lunches turned out to be a Larry rabbit hole as they became ever more exotic. When we ran through the regular menus, we were on to the Chinese-language menus and then onto things that were off-menu. The meal I remember best was a dish of beef tendon and turnips. Even Larry admitted that that one was rough.

    Larry was happy to talk about anything, but it was hard to pull a philosophy conversation out of him. Every day at lunch there was like a one-minute window to ask a philosophy question, which he would respond to with something that was totally enthymematic. You had to sort out where he was going with his comment and how he got there. This isn’t to say you couldn’t make progress – you could, but it was at a very low baud rate. You just had to wait 24 hours to ask the follow-up question. I think maybe he was doling out the philosophy slowly so he would always have someone to eat lunch with, like if he gave it all away in one meal he would be eating alone. Over time, and over many meals of entrails and chicken feet and beef tendons and turnips a picture emerged. By 2007 I had woven together (from our conversations) a huge tapestry of moves and countermoves that Larry thought you could make in the philosophy of time.

    One thing that was clear in my conversations with Larry was that he was very open-minded about matters in the philosophy of science, although within certain parameters. I guess this was clear from his books and papers too. There are a lot of things you can get away with philosophically, but some things you absolutely could not get away with on his view; it all depended on what else you were willing to say. So, my questions tended to be of the form “can I get away with arguing or saying this” or something of that form. And then his answers were, “well yes, but only if you …”. It was all so much fun, and I will miss him. Dude was a legend.

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  9. Bob Batterman

    Larry was my thesis advisor and friend. In the 1980s, I felt I was also his personal trainer. While working on my dissertation, as he was writing “Physics and Chance”, I would go to his office to ask a question: “Larry, I’ve got a question about x”—something to do with irreversibility, Prigogine, Krylov, . . . . He would stand up and walk out of his office and travel down the hallway in Angell hall. Keeping up with him I breathlessly would try to get him to answer my question. He never did, directly. It was a lesson that I took to heart: figure it out yourself and then tell me what you’ve come up with. I miss him dearly.

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  10. Eric Fersht

    I took Larry Sklar’s course at Michigan soon after he published his remarkable book “Space, Time, and Spacetime” in 1974. It was brilliant and he was brilliant. His lectures usually traveled at the speed of light. I’m sure I missed many of his most important insights but he was always engaging and a generous teacher. I’m sorry to learn of his passing.

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