Godfrey Guillamin, Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico City

Rick Creath, President’s Professor, Arizona State University

Alan Rocke, History, Case-Western Reserve University

Down the years Larry Laudan had many fans, me included. He was much admired and respected both as a thinker and a person. Nobody reading his papers or his books needs telling he was a rigorous thinker who followed the available evidence as he saw it wherever it led regardless of however much it tested prevailing opinion. Nor was it any different in face-to-face encounters. The far fewer who had the benefit of engaging directly with him profited greatly from battling over what they or he were struggling to figure out. Larry was not one to stand on ceremony but neither was he one to skimp on generosity, kindness or affability. When ideas were at stake it was pretty much a life-and-death matter. My impression was he was hellbent at pinning things down and getting the doubters to see where they were going astray.

Like most who fought with and against what Larry committed to print I see his writings as falling into three main groups, two of which influenced me early on and for a considerable time later. First there are the investigations devoted to the history of the methodology of science, still to my mind of sterling significance. They were the result of much digging and anyone interested in how scientific inquiry was conceived since 1700, especially the method of hypothesis and scientific methodology in the nineteenth century, can hardly do better than turn to his Science and Hypothesis. And not only in the first instance.

Secondly there is the work Larry is best known for, his advocacy of an alternative to the views of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos on theory choice and scientific progress. What he put on the table about problem solving, the so-called pessimistic induction and the allures of relativism could not be ignored, and even those of us who balked partly if not wholly at his conclusions could not ignore what he said in Progress and Its Problems and Science and Values. We felt we had to do our level best to show where he was going wrong, no easy task.

Thirdly there is his late turn to the philosophy of law and the role of evidence in criminal trials. This fell well out of my area of interest at the time, but I am told by people in the know that it is no less important, meticulously argued and challenging than his earlier work.

I was fortunate to have met Larry during a sabbatical year over thirty years ago when he was at still at the University of Pittsburgh. A paper of mine on what I called overdetermined problems in science caught his eye and he took me, still very much a beginner, under his wing. During the year we had many discussions about the history and philosophy of science, discussions that influenced me and steered my thinking throughout the 1980s.

Subsequently we corresponded regularly and I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to team-teach a class with him when he moved to Virginia Polytechnic Institute. One topic that occupied us in those days that sticks very much in my mind is the existence and nature of deep disagreement in science. I also vividly recall resisting his anti-realist tendencies with examples from the history of geology, notably what I took to be the unimpeachable fact of the Ice Age in the geologically recent past. Needless to say on both scores Larry parried my arguments as fast as I was able to formulate them.

Later on we kept in touch but more desultorily and we increasingly parted company when it came to philosophy. I became more and more absorbed in figuring out Wittgenstein’s thought, something Larry had next to no time for, indeed rather the opposite. I doubt he realized or would have been happy to learn that this turn in my interest was partly fueled by our discussions of scientific disagreement.

Looking back on the years I knew Larry – and naturally Rachel as well – I can only appreciate his influence both positive and negative. I was lucky to have met him early on and to have had the opportunity to debate issues in the history and philosophy of science at length with him. He was less than a year older than me but I always looked upon him as senior and was then and now grateful for his wise and steady counsel. Larry could be a tough taskmaster, especially in print, but personally he was nothing short of a “bloody fine bloke”.

I only wish I had known him more and had been in closer contact during the years after Virginia Tech. Our diverging interests notwithstanding, he would have kept me on my toes, and I should like to think I would have served as a useful sounding board for him as he pressed ahead and plowed new ground.

University of Ottawa, Canada

Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

Professor Antonio Dieguez, University of Malaga, Spain, was kind enough to write this long, considered obituary in the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial.

https://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2022-09-02/larry-laudan-obituario-filosofia-de-la-ciencia_3483766/