The Philosophy of Continuity: A Philosophical Interpretation of the Metrical Continuum of Physical Events in the Light of Contemporary Mathematical Conceptions (1951)
Being Jewish, Adolf Grünbaum's family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and emigrated to the United States.[1]
Grünbaum received a B.A. with twofold High Distinction in philosophy and in mathematics from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1943.
During the Second World War, Grünbaum was trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and thus was one of the Ritchie Boys. He was stationed in Berlin and interrogated highly placed Nazis, returning to the United States in 1946.[2]
Grünbaum obtained both his M.S. in physics (1948) and his PhD in philosophy (1951) from Yale University. He was a chaired professor of philosophy at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1956–1960), after rising through the ranks there, starting in 1950, becoming a full professor in 1955.
In the fall of 1960, Grünbaum left Lehigh University to join the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, where he became the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy. In that year, he also became the founding director of that University's Center for Philosophy of Science, serving as director until 1978. He and the colleagues he recruited then built world-class philosophy and history and philosophy of science departments at the university. Several of these colleagues had come from Yale University's philosophy department, starting in 1962. During this recruitment period the University of Pittsburgh appointed Nicholas Rescher, Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Gale, Nuel Belnap, Alan Ross Anderson, and Gerald Massey, among others.
In 2003, Grünbaum resigned from the department of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, while retaining his lifetime tenured Mellon Chair and all of his other affiliations at that university.[3]
Grünbaum was the author of nearly 400 articles and book chapters as well as books on space-time and the critique of psychoanalysis. He is often viewed as part of the American brand of logical empiricism, associated especially with Hans Reichenbach.[7]
Grünbaum did not embrace the prevailing — especially among physical scientists — Popperian philosophy of science, leading to some notoriety in the 1960s after he was ridiculed in print by the physicist Richard Feynman.[8] A much-quoted exchange followed Grünbaum's neo-Leibnizian suggestion that the flow of time might be an illusion only in conscious entities, in which Feynman asked whether dogs, then cockroaches, were sufficiently conscious entities.[9] Reportedly as a mark of further disdain,[10] Feynman refused to let his name be printed, becoming instead the easily recognizable "Mr. X".[8]
Some 40 years later, writer Jim Holt would characterize Grünbaum as, in the 1950s, "the foremost thinker about the subtleties of space and time," and as, by the 2000s, "arguably the greatest living philosopher of science." Holt portrays a rationalist Grünbaum who rejects any hint of mysteriousness in the cosmos (a "great rejector").[11]
Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (1993)[16]
Collected Works, Volume 1 (ed. by Thomas Kupka): Scientific Rationality, the Human Condition, and 20th Century Cosmologies, Oxford University Press 2013. Volume 2: The Philosophy of Space & Time (ed. by Thomas Kupka), is forthcoming 2019; Volume 3: Lectures on Psychoanalysis (ed. by Thomas Kupka & Leanne Longwill), is forthcoming 2019 as well (both also with OUP).
Three celebratory books ("Festschrift" volumes) dealing with his work have been published to date:
(1983) Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum. R.S. Cohen and L. Lauden (eds.). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
(1993) Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds: Essays on the Philosophy of Adolf Grünbaum. J. Earman, A.I. Janis, G.J. Massey, and N. Rescher (eds.). Pittsburgh, PA/Konstanz, Germany: University of Pittsburgh Press/University of Konstanz Press.
(2009) Philosophy of Religion, Physics, and Psychology: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum. Proceedings of the international conference,『The Adolf Grünbaum Symposium in Honor of the Works of Professor Adolf Grünbaum,』Santa Barbara, CA, October 2002. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
^"Logical Empiricism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2021.
^ abJames Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, pp. 123-4)
^Thomas Gold (ed.), The Nature of Time (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).
^Hermann Bondi,『Thomas Gold. 22 May 1920 — 22 June 2004,』Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 2006 52, 117-35
^Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (New York: Norton, 2012)
^(1967) "Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion," in: R.M. Gale (ed.), The Philosophy of Time. A Collection of Essays. New York: Anchor Doubleday Books, pp. 422–494. (1968) Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
^(1968) Geometry and Chronometry in Philosophical Perspective. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
^(1963) Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. A British edition was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, London (1964). (1973) "Philosophical Problems of Space and Time," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. XII. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
^(1984) The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. This book also appears in French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, and Polish translations.
^(1993) Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis, A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
