RIP Howard Stein January 21, 1929-8 March, 2024

Plato never wrote the hinted-at sequel to the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, to have been called the Philosopher. I have long cherished the fantasy, anachronistic though it be, that in that work Socrates, questioning Aristotle, would have led him to admit that it is impossible to know whether one knows, and that if wisdom is the contrary state to wonder, then philosophy never ends.—Howard Stein

Today David Malament informed me that Howard Stein died on March 8th, 2024. Howard was the pre-eminent philosopher of physics of his generation, and also made very important contributions to the history of physics and mathematics, and the history of philosophy especially in Ancient and early modern. Much of his career was spent at The University of Chicago (where he obtained his PhD in 1958), but he also worked at Case Western and Columbia (where he had also been an undergraduate) as well as a stint as a mathematician at Honeywell.

As André Carus has argued, Howard was very much a student of Carnap (see here for a useful treatment). (Not unlike Carnap, Howard struggled with back problems; as these became worse, his medicines caused him fatigue, which made even minor correspondence quite slow-moving, alongside deteriorating eye-sight.) But for various reason Henryk Mehlberg was his doctoral supervisor. It would be misleading to suggest that Howard was also a student of McKeon, but he had been attracted to him once and Howard’s profound knowledge of the history of philosophy reflects his intellectual struggle with McKeon’s legacy. He once wrote me and Matt Parker (a propos of my memory of Howard’s dismissal of Burtt’s reading of Newton) that as an undergraduate, Howard reports he “had a keen interest in science--especially physics--as well as mathematics; and, in philosophy, I had a strong aversion to (or do I mean "from") empiricism and positivism, and a leaning--apart from Plato--to Whitehead.” The leaning toward Plato survived the encounter with Carnap.

In general philosophy of science, Howard is treated as one of the founders (or inspirations) of so-called (‘ontic’) ‘structural realism.’ (When asked about it, this amused him.) He had major polemical exchanges with Putnam and Rietdijk on the nature of becoming in Minkowski space-time. In a rather profound polemic with McDowell (here), Stein articulated his understanding of “philosophy as allied with the sciences in searching for the best understanding-and-knowledge of the world – including ourselves.” One of his major lasting contributions is to teach that whatever Newton’s substantivalism might have been, it was nothing like what Leibniz and generations of metaphysicians to this today present it as. And also that Huygens and Newton saw quite deeply into the nature of relativity.

I went to the University of Chicago to work with Howard in 1995. One of my undergraduate mentors, George E. Smith, had met Howard through Bill Harper at Western Ontario. The three of them were very much a mutual admiration society. In my first year in graduate school, I took the year long graduate seminar on the history of space-time theories with Howard. The following year, I took his graduate seminar on Carnap and his graduate course on British Empiricism.

Subsequently, he was the supervisor (together with Ian Mueller) of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato’s Laws, and he defended my career when Martha Nussbaum threatened to fail me out of graduate school. He co-supervised my dissertation on the reception of Newton by Hume and Adam Smith, but I nudged him off my committee when he refused to write me a job-market letter back in 2001. He thought I was going on the market prematurely, but I had few options to stay in school because I had no access to another fellowship (because I had taken money from Mellon foundation on the condition that I could get no further stipends). His withholding of support was undoubtedly traumatic for me, but in later years he always treated me as one of his students sometimes reminding me in the process that he had never broken with me.

The course on Carnap was of wider sociological importance. In the 1990s, it was widely felt that ‘Quine had won the debate with Carnap.’ Stein had demurred (see here). This predominant view in favor of Quine was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that Harvard was the dominant department of the period, and that many people had been shaped by Putnam’s views on the matter. (Putnam had very many graduate students.) In addition, Carnapian explication did not provide an easy route to publication whereas embrace of ‘naturalism’ did in those days. Many people who have contributed to the veritable Carnap revival in North America — both as a historical and a philosophical project — had attended Howard’s course at one point.

Stein taught in three-hours long seminars, and found it difficult to cut himself off in a timely fashion. There was an unspoken rule that students did not ask any questions in the final half hour because one could easily end up adding much time due to his meticulousness in leaving no stone unturned and ensuring that his students were clear on the matter. While he could be very intimidating demanding from others the kind of clarity he demanded from himself, he always welcomed questions especially from the remarkable undergraduates that would attend his classes.

A real question would stop him in his train of thought. His hand would be pulled up in front of his mouth. And after a moment, he would gently stroke his beard. His mind was incredibly quick — as he always revealed in Q&As during colloquia — but a student’s question would slow him down. And if he judged the question as insightful, he could lock eyes with the student (no, never me) that revealed an intense fire; he would switch from lecture mode to dialogue, and for as long as both sides willed it all posturing and all sense of social decorum or hierarchy were pushed aside. An a-temporal communion of minds would follow that would labor to reveal a crystalline clarity lurking behind the question.

I remember that I was utterly bewildered during the first session on ancient theories of space-time, when Howard started writing out a mathematical expression on the blackboard that was, in fact, one extended, parenthetical aside embedded in another parenthesis. To everyone’s astonishment my classmate Matt Frank caught an error in one of the signs a half-way into the open parenthesis.

In many courses, he would put his own papers as recommended readings on reserve. Many of these were long-hand, final drafts. I remember many late afternoons spent in Regenstein as the sun would set over the horizon, while I was reading his meticulous handwriting holding the paper upside down in order to follow the train of thought of an inserted sentence of Ciceronian length that would curl itself around the margin of the page before one had to turn it over where the sentence continued curling itself around another page.

Because of his high standards, Howard didn’t publish much. And some of his best work has never appeared in print, and it often circulated as lectures or mimeographs. Luckily, one of his former students, Erik Curiel, has collected some of the most important of these (here). I am especially pleased Curiel managed to elicit a version of his lecture, “How Does Physics Bear upon Metaphysics; and Why Did Plato Hold That Philosophy Cannot Be Written Down?”, which was recently published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. (The closing lines of that essay are quoted at the top of this post.)

Howard did not suffer academic fools lightly. He often held others to the same standards as he held himself as the footnotes to his papers could reveal. This generated non-trivial academic hostility as I learned when I was a junior scholar in the discipline. Once I co-edited a volume and the press’ referee objected to the tenor of the footnotes in Stein’s paper (not surprisingly the referee was one of the targets) that I had managed to solicit from Stein. The press’ editor took sides with the referee and insisted Howard’s paper be removed. I have long regretted that I did not take that volume elsewhere. I hope André Carus puts out a volume of Howard’s unpublished papers. You, my dear reader, could do worse than spending your remaining days reading his corpus on Curiel’s website.

It’s fair to say that Howard’s standards had a debilitating effect on me (and a few other of his PhD students). When I left Tufts I was a scientific naturalist very much in the mold of Dennett (and not far removed from one of my other teachers, Bill Wimsatt). By the time I left graduate school I had become a skeptic not because Howard was himself a skeptic (he would not apply that moniker to himself) but because I internalized a pale version of his critical acumen, and when I honed in on any position I could discern the quicksand and special pleading on which it was founded.

Even when we are writing on the same topics (say Newton’s metaphysics or the nature of empiricism), nobody would confuse my own work with Howard’s. But immersing myself in his papers has shaped me in innumerable ways. One of the most crucial ones is that clarity of thought does not require simple, declarative sentences, and that getting things right need not result in simple-to-summarize stances. Howard was himself, thus, a philosopher’s philosopher, and even in that audience too many recoiled from the sustained engagement his work requires.

The pay-off of all that work involve flashes of understanding — akin to intuitive knowledge in Spinoza’s sense — that illuminate our collective knowledge about the structure of the universe, or a past philosopher’s attempt to convey such understanding. Because his work contains a resistance to easy summary, it often does not fit into the narratives of philosophers self-categorization. For example, ín SEP, when offering evidence for the categorization of Stein as offering a “Platonic version of OSR” [ontic structural realism”] this occurs with a distinct lack of confidence: “is perhaps what Howard Stein has in mind.”

Much to my own surprise, as I found my own voice without trying to emulate his, I ended up disagreeing with some of Howard’s most important contributions to the study of Newton’s metaphysics, including his famous ‘field’ interpretation of Newtonian centripetal forces. I found it difficult to really imagine I had offered a plausible interpretation at all until Bill Harper treated our positions as genuine alternatives in his Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method.

This memoriam has not done justice to Howard’s wide-ranging erudition in literature and music; nor his marvelous impromptu, intellectual feats (not the least his ability to catch translation errors in Chinese menus without possessing any knowledge of Chinese). And this post has failed to convey the excitement with which he could share new discoveries. One of his last emails to me dates from June 21, 2022. I quote a characteristic passage that conveys this excitement; each sentence below informs me of something I already know, and yet simultaneously loved learning again in Howard’s distinctive voice:

By the way, some time ago I came upon a small but quite remarkable literary collection by a Dutch writer who published under the same nom de plume that you use for e-mail: Nescio; and this leads me to wonder whether you know his work, and deliberately borrowed the name, or whether the coincidence is a mere coincidence.--The real name of the author (but can names be "real"?--well, according to the nominalists, of concepts only the names are real; but viewed in this light, can names be other than real?)--as that parenthesis shows, one thing I do suffer from is senile decline--or have I always been so unbearable?--don't answer!--To resume that sentence: The true name of the author (no, I won't carry on as if this were a theme and variations) is Grönloh--J. H. F. Grönloh--though some of his pieces are narrated in the first person by a man the others refer to as Koekebakker (I take it that Koekebakker is to Grönloh approximately as Marlow is to Conrad). I have read these works (in translation, of course) in a slim volume published by New York Review Books under the title "Amsterdam Stories by Nescio". If you don't know them, I recommend them to you (in the original, of course: I gather from the translation, which in itself is very well written, that Grönloh's prose is first rate).

Howard died less than a week after refusing further medical treatment. RIP.