2 responses to “In Memoriam: Alan Musgrave (1940-2026)”

1. Gary Bartlett

   January 23, 2026 at 3:46 pm

   I remember Alan fondly from my time as an undergrad at Otago in the 90s. My peers and I had no idea (or at least I didn’t) that we were being taught by such a major figure in philosophy of science. We just saw this gangly, droll, and clearly immensely intelligent man with a funny British accent. I only got an inkling of his stature in the profession when I was applying to graduate schools, and my advisor remarked that a lot of people would be hugely impressed to see that I had a letter from Alan Musgrave.

   Alan would proudly display his “Beware of the Mad Dog Realist” sign to us in class, while simultaneously insisting that he was, in fact, only a “lap dog” realist – because he was not a mathematical Platonist.

   I’m amused, now, that I learned of his passing on the same day I read of Bas van Fraassen’s receipt of the Schock Prize. Alan would have been the first to applaud that award, I’m sure – but he would have been unable to resist following the applause with a withering critique of van Fraassen’s views! There was much exposition and critique of van Fraassen in Alan’s philosophy of science class.

   Most of all, though, I remember Alan’s kindness and patience towards his students, and his impish sense of humor. My thoughts are with his family.

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2. Charles Pigden

   March 25, 2026 at 4:48 pm

   Alan Musgrave: Life and Work
   We mourn the death of Emeritus Professor Alan Musgrave (1940-2026) who will be remembered as a dominating presence at the University of Otago for over forty years.

   Alan was only 29 when he was appointed as Professor and Head the Department of Philosophy in 1970. Born in 1940, in the Manchester area, he was raised until the age of five by his mother, his grandmother and his aunts, since all their men were away at the War. (Alan’s father, a veteran of the Malaysia campaigns, returned from the East with his health shattered and suffered thereafter from recurrent bouts of malaria). A big event in Alan’s life, as for many another working class lad, was passing the Eleven Plus exam which meant that he got into Grammar School thereby accessing an academic education. ‘Good Student; Bad Attitude’ rather sums him up, since he worked hard, passing exams and winning prizes, but annoyed his teachers because of his stroppy disposition. Having passed his O-levels with flying colours, he considered leaving school at 16 to get a job to help support his family who were not well-off, but his mother told him not to as it would break her heart. He went on to Sixth Form to do his A-Levels and her heart remained unbroken. Although Alan was good at most things, he was slightly better at the science-side subjects and was told, rather peremptorily, that he should do Pure and Applied Maths, Physics and Chemistry. The Bad Attitude reasserted itself and he chose to do English, French, Geography and History instead. In later life Alan delivered spell-binding lectures on the History and Philosophy of Science. The History A- Level probably helped with the History part, but his knowledge of science and mathematics was made up later and in a very peculiar way.

   After completing his A-Levels Alan went on to the London School of Economics to do Law. When he heard that he needed a rich father to support him as a lawyer until he had built up a clientele, he switched to the new subject of Philosophy and Economics. He found Karl Popper’s lectures inspirational (no text, no handouts and Popper talking without notes about whatever happened to interest him) and perhaps in consequence did very well in his final exams. He had intended to be a secondary school teacher but was accosted in the corridor by the up-and-coming philosopher of science, the Hungarian Imre Lakatos, who told him, in no uncertain terms, that he ought to do research. When Alan replied that he needed a grant and that the deadline to apply for one had passed, Lakatos (who had a remarkable ability to bend bureaucracies to his will) managed to procure him a PhD Scholarship from the Lancashire County Council. Popper was Alan’s official supervisor, but Lakatos thought that he did not know enough maths and physics to do a decent PhD and undertook to tutor him in the subjects while Alan reciprocated by correcting Lakatos’s sometimes aberrant English. For the next few years Alan toiled away on his PhD whilst working for and with Popper and Lakatos in a of variety capacities – research assistant, junior lecturer co-editor and conference factotum – marrying and starting a family in the process. By the time he arrived at Otago, Alan had already compiled the index to Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations, and co-edited the academic best-seller, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Like all good indices, Musgrave’s index to Conjectures and Refutations contains at least one joke: Marxism – made irrefutable, 34f, 37, 333f; – refuted, 37 & n, 333.

   Popper played a major part in getting Alan appointed to the Otago Chair. The Vice-Chancellor, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor and the Dean of Arts and Music were all former students and colleagues of Popper’s and they were therefore inclined to take Popper’s recommendations very seriously. Although Alan took a dim view of what he described as ‘the Popper Church’ (Popperian critical rationalists who were insufficiently critical of Popper) he remained a heretical Popperian throughout his career.

   Alan thought that Science (done right) provides an excellent, though fallible, set of methods for finding out about a mind-independent world. Alan’s chief interests were in the Theory of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Science, each represented by a book, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism: A Historical Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (1993) and Essays on Realism and Rationalism (1999). He also had a collection of mostly lighter and more popular pieces, Secular Sermons (2009). These are all stylish performances, notable for their clarity, cogency and wit. According to the noted Greek Philosopher of Science Stathis Psillos, Alan was “a true giant of the [philosophy] profession. Always unpretentious and exceedingly modest, he wrote some of the most significant papers in the philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century”. His citations are so numerous that when, some years ago, we tried to get a precise list for official purposes, we had to throw up our hands in despair. He won the Otago Distinguished Research Medal and was awarded the 2012 Humanities Aronui Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand for his “enduring and profound influence as a philosopher of science”.

   Alan’s Ideas
   So, what were those enduring and profound ideas that exerted such an influence? I quote from Alan’s student, friend and colleague, Colin Cheyne:

   “For Musgrave it is simply common-sensical to believe that an external world exists independently of the workings of our minds and that the aim of science is to discover what we can about that world, even though we cannot hope to have certain knowledge of it. Musgrave’s robust common sense about the external world seems to have clashed with antirealist philosophies from the start. He tells how as an undergraduate he was ‘both fascinated and repelled by Berkeley’s idealism. All that ingenuity wasted on a crazy view’.”

   Consequently, Alan devoted his philosophical life, in one way or another, to uncovering the errors in Berkeley’s arguments, and to detecting and denouncing any other arguments that threaten to make the world dependent on minds rather than minds on the world. There is, however, a catch, which made Alan still a kind of sceptic, despite his firm belief in the existence of an external world which is more or less as science represents it [scientific realism]. In Alan’s view if you want absolute certainty, you can’t have mind-independence, and if you want mind-independence, you can’t have absolute certainty. Alan preferred mind-independence to certainty, though he was inclined to argue that quite a lot of philosophers who sacrifice mind-independence to certainty end up with neither mind-independence nor certainty. Science provides us with knowledge of an external world but not absolutely certain knowledge.

   Alan was vigorous in defence of these views. He gloried in a rough-hewn sign ‘Beware of the Mad-Dog Realist!’ which he kept in his office, celebrating his role as a champion of scientific realism. However he was inclined to add that he was really a lap-dog realist since he was not a realist about mathematical entities such as set and numbers, nor did he believe in such things as ‘sakes’ (as in ‘We are doing this for Simon’s sake’) which he thought should be analysed away as figures of speech. At a conference in Florence, Musgrave read a typically forceful paper ‘Conceptual Idealism and Stove’s Gem’ which concluded with the ringing words: “Conceptual Idealism is a ludicrous and anti-scientific view of the world. … We should take science seriously, reject the Gem for the invalid argument that it is, and abandon the idealism to which it leads”. There was a burst of applause followed by dead silence. The chairman, to get things going, asked if there were any conceptual idealists present who would like to comment on Professor Musgrave’s paper. “Not any more”, came a voice from the back.

   However Alan was not a one-trick, nor even a two-trick, pony, since his interests were not confined to Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science. Perhaps the most important of his many important papers is a successful foray into the Philosophy of Economics, perhaps not so surprising in a graduate of the London School of *Economics* who was always a strong supporter of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Otago. His paper ‘Unreal Assumptions in Economic Theory: The F-Twist Untwisted’ (512 citation according to Google Scholar) is a brilliant critique of Milton Friedman’s bizarre but influential thesis that it doesn’t matter how unrealistic an economic theory may be so long as it has predictive power. Alan contends that Friedman’s argument depends upon a misunderstanding of the role of simplifications and idealisation in science. When tracking planets in the night sky, it is okay, and may be even useful, to treat them as point masses rather than massive globes, but this is not to assume that they really are point masses or to think that we should treat them as such when planning the trajectory of a planetary flyby. Friedman is radically confused about such things.

   Alan as Teacher and Mentor
   So much for Alan as a research philosopher. But there is much more to be said about Alan as a teacher, a mentor and an academic leader, in all of which capacities he excelled. Let’s start with his spell-binding lectures on the Theory of Knowledge which form the basis of his book Common Sense, Science and Scepticism. These could be life-changing. Here is Graham Oddie, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, looking back to the 1970s.

   “My next encounter with the Professor was in the first lecture of his Introduction to Philosophy course—and that was a very different experience. I can still see him striding up and down at the front of the lecture hall, talking loudly without lecture notes in his accent from Manchester, punctuating sundry claims with a belligerent ‘Yes?’ hat more or less demanded agreement. Alan’s excellent lectures were highly entertaining, enormously informative, amazingly clear, totally lacking in obfuscation, and bracingly partisan. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the profession, he was adamant that the discipline of philosophy had made real progress, that philosophical conjectures could be, and often were, refuted. It was obvious when Alan thought a philosophical conjecture had been successfully refuted. It was also obvious that he was a passionate advocate for a brand of common-sense realism mixed in with a healthy dose of skepticism (which he called fallibilism). This was heady stuff for a seventeen-year-old who knew absolutely nothing. By the time that first lecture was over I was hooked on whatever it was the absurdly young professor was doing up there – philosophy – and I have been ever since.”

   In later life Alan’s lectures were a bit less brash, but just as entertaining, just as informative, just as lucid though perhaps a little less partisan, and they were still just as likely to make converts to philosophy. Here is Cei Maslen, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington: “Alan was an amazing teacher. I took my first ever philosophy course from him at Otago in 1988, PHILOSOPHY 102: Theory of Knowledge. His passion for philosophy was contagious. His realist approach was also contagious: seeking the truth, and convincing others is of the utmost importance. I’m so grateful to him for introducing me to this beautiful subject and encouraging me to carry on. On my visits back to Otago, Alan seemed unchanging: white shirt, sparkling eyes, unfailing encouragement.  A wonderful role model and a lovely man.”

   Here is Kelvin McQueen, BA hons 2006, MA 2008, Associate Professor, Chapman University: “[Alan was] first mentor in philosophy. I owe my love of philosophy to him.”

   Here is Tiddy Smith, BA hons 2011, PhD 2017, author of The Methods of Science and Religion: Epistemologies in Conflict and Animism and Philosophy of Religion: Alan, he says, was his “philosophical inspiration and mentor”. “He helped me immensely during my thesis and I modelled all my writing and rhetoric directly on him.”

   Finally, Kirsten Walsh (PhD 2015), now a lecturer at the University Exeter and one of the last of Alan’s graduate students: “Alan Musgrave was my second PhD supervisor. We disagreed about almost everything, and it always felt like a huge privilege that he would take the time to argue with me. I never came around to his way of thinking, and nor did he to mine, but I always learned a lot more, both about my position and about how to do philosophy of science, by arguing with him. One thing we did share, however, was a fascination with Newton. Alan borrowed my copy of Westfall’s biography of Newton, Never at Rest, one time, and it still smells like the tobacco smoke from his pipe. It’s difficult to overstate Alan’s importance to Otago’s Philosophy Department. His decades of leadership and continued presence helped to cultivate a vibrant and active research community – one that was, and continues to be, far more than the sum of its parts. Thank you, Alan, for your part in turning me into the philosopher I am.”

   Alan As Departmental Chief
   Kirsten’s remarks bring us to another topic – Alan’s role as an academic leader. As Jindra Tichy (sometime tutor in Philosophy, a famous novelist in her native Czech, and widow of Alan’s first appointee, Pavel Tichy) puts it in her memoir, Prague in My Bones, it was Alan’s ambition “to change an old-fashioned department into a modern school of thought, equal to the best philosophy departments Western Europe and the US. It is great testament to his talent, ambition and ability that within a few years he succeeded”. That’s a big claim but there is evidence to back it up. In 2003 the research performance of New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Institutions was assessed for the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF), the New Zealand equivalent of the British RAE/REF. According to the resulting report, Philosophy was the highest scoring research discipline in New Zealand, and the highest scoring department was the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago. Thus, the Otago Department of Philosophy was not only the top-ranking department of philosophy and the top-ranking department at Otago, but the highest-scoring research department of any kind in the country. In 2007 we improved upon this result, raising our collective score from 6.6 to 7.5 making us for the second time the top-scoring department at Otago, the top-scoring philosophy department and the top-scoring research department of any kind in New Zealand. How did Alan do it?

   A lot of it has to do with Alan’s personal character. It is not quite right to say that Alan was a modest man since he was confident in his own abilities and not at all diffident about arguing for his opinions, sometimes ferociously. But there is a sense in which he was a humble man. There was no ‘side’ to Alan, no sense of entitlement: he habitually treated people with respect (which did not preclude vehemently disagreeing with them). One of the things that he liked about New Zealand was its egalitarian ethos. He tells the tale of how pleased he was at his first arrival in New Zealand when a taxi-driver refused a tip saying “I am not your servant”. He enjoyed living in an “I am not your servant” society and he was himself very much an “I am not your servant/you are not my servant” kind of guy. He ran the Philosophy Department along collegial lines as a primus inter pares. He was also eager to foster other people’s talents. Hence the tribute from Heather Dyke (now Head the Department): “Alan was the best mentor I could have had when I started here, a brilliant philosopher and teacher, and I will miss him immensely He made a huge impact on my life and career and is one of the kindest, most generous and supportive philosophers it has ever been my privilege to meet, let alone work alongside”. He was, as colleagues and co-workers can testify, a good man to have as your boss. And this relates to another of Alan’s key characteristics. He was a highly sociable person, always willing to discuss philosophical or other issues over lunch or dinner. Indeed, in the early days when the department was quite small, it was marked by a high degree of mutual hospitality, particularly between the Musgraves (Alan and is wife Julia) and the Tichys (Alan’s first recruit, the brilliant logician Pavel Tichy – an even more ferocious debater than Alan himself – and his wife, Jindra). The tradition of philosophical conviviality has persisted down the years. Staff and senior students typically meet at the pub on seminar days to socialise and talk philosophy.

   Secondly, Alan had a knack for picking philosophical talent. As one of the talents that Alan picked, I would say that wouldn’t I? But again there is plenty of evidence for this claim. Many of Musgrave appointees, who worked for a while at Otago, went on to high achievement elsewhere. There is Greg Currie, Lecturer and then Professor at Otago, now Emeritus Professor at the University of York and leading expert on the Philosophy of Literature: “I count Alan a friend of fifty years as well as my first philosophy teacher (LSE), the person who gave me a post doc that let me cling on to academia in hard times, as well as my first permanent post”. There is Jeremy Waldron, Assistant Lecturer 1975-78, sometime Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, who describes Alan as “a prince”. There is Graham Oddie, Lecturer and Associate Professor during the eighties and nineties, now Emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is noted for his work on how a theory can be false but nonetheless ‘like’ the truth, and nowadays for his work in ethics. There is Paul Griffiths, formerly Challis Professor at Sydney, whose brilliant book What Emotions Really Are (1997) was largely written during his time at Otago in the nineties. And there is Tim Mulgan, Professor at St Andrews and now Auckland, noted for his work on consequentialism, population ethics and the moral implications of a ‘broken’ world. That’s five brilliant philosophers, appointed by Alan, whose subsequent careers amply justify his choice.

   From the first, it was Alan’s aim to reinforce the research culture at Otago by beefing up the weekly Staff Seminar, and a lot of the credit for the Philosophy Department’s success goes to this ongoing institution. A steady stream of international visitors is particularly important for a small department, which, though a lot less remote than it once was, is still quite a long way from almost everywhere else. So too is the opportunity for staff to test out their ideas in front of a critical audience. Staff attendance is mandatory. One of the few occasions that I got a telling-off from Alan, during the twenty-odd years that he was my boss, was when I skipped a session to complete some urgent task. Debate is vigorous, though we have perhaps mellowed a bit since Alan’s heyday. If you deliver a carefully crafted and nuanced paper, designed to provoke a sage nodding of heads, some obstreperous person is likely to demand exactly what the problem is and how exactly the argument is supposed to work. If you deliver a polemical paper with a clear argument to novel and interesting conclusions, either the premises or the conclusions are likely to be denounced as false, sometimes obviously so. You might decide to play it safe by arguing for an uncontroversial conclusion, but even this is not an entirely risk-free strategy, since it is hard to find uncontroversial theses in philosophy, and anyway, such a conclusion is likely to be dismissed as uninteresting.

   Alan’s own debating style was tinged with humour. Alex Miller recalls that, following a talk that Alan had given, an audience member meandered all over the shop, humming and hawing about what Alan might have meant, until Alan quietly interjected “Come on, are you asking me a question or trying to psychoanalyse me?”

   Alan and the Wider University
   Alan did not just run the Philosophy Department for over thirty years – he also played a major role in running the wider University. He served a term as the (elected) Dean of Arts and Music, was an elected member of the University Council, Vice-Chairman of Senate and (for a time) Pro-Vice-Chancellor Academic. He did not find administrative work a chore but enjoyed the feeling that he was doing good and in particular that he was making things better for Otago’s students. He pushed through a number of reforms, replacing a unit-based system with a more flexible paper-based approach and abolishing the compulsory viva for PhDs. Alan rightly regarded vivas (especially in the pre-Zoom era) as often a waste of time and money. Perhaps this view was conditioned by his own memorably bizarre viva, way back in the sixties at the LSE. There was hardly any discussion of Alan’s PhD thesis itself. Instead Sir Karl Popper, the internal examiner, interrogated Professor O’Connor, the external examiner, about a paper by a third philosopher that Alan had not read, while endeavouring to contact yet another philosopher, the rather deaf Professor Catlin, in order to persuade the said Professor to persuade his daughter, who happened to be the Minster for Education, to make a statement in the House Commons condemning the student radicals of 1968. The student radicals had (among other things) temporarily exiled Sir Karl from his office. Sadly, Alan’s reform was subsequently reversed and vivas are again compulsory at Otago though they are probably better conducted than they were once-upon-a-time at the LSE.

   From 2004 Alan served a term as the University Orator, his job being to give graceful little speeches on official occasions such as the award of honorary degrees. Alan had a real gift for this, so much so that it was hard not be envious of his talents, but it was some consolation to his colleagues to know that these apparently effortless productions cost him quite a lot of effort. Indeed, he could sometimes be heard literally moaning and groaning as he searched for the mot juste. “Oh God, what am I going to say about X?” – a problem that was particularly acute on those occasions when he was expected to praise the unpraiseworthy or to supply a humanising anecdote for somebody notably lacking in human warmth. When it came to turning out graceful and witty speeches Alan was an artist, so it is reassuring to know that he suffered for his art.

   But it was not just speechwriting that made Alan groan out loud. Surprisingly for a successful STEM student, he was remarkable for his lack of computing skills and indeed for his all-round technological incompetence. He would groan audibly when his computer did not do what he wanted (which was often) until somebody marginally less incompetent, such as myself, came along to help him. He once told me that one of his sons had bought him an electronic organizer for Christmas. I replied that this was like buying a microscope for a stone-age man.

   Conclusion
   The brilliant light of Alan’s intellect has now gone out. But he can still talk to us through his books and writings, and we can still talk to him by thinking about his work. And many people the world over, both philosophers and others, will continue to benefit from the passion for Philosophy that he often inspired, from his teaching, from his mentorship and from his friendship, as well as his services to Philosophy in general, to the Philosophy Department at Otago in particular, and to the University of Otago as a whole, both of which he helped to lead for so many years. A long life, a fortunate life and a life well-lived.

   -Kōrero by Professor Charles Pigden from the Philosophy Programme at Otago. Charles was a longtime colleague and friend of Emeritus Professor Alan Musgrave.

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