Stephen Gaukroger, professor emeritus at the University of Sydney, died this past September.

Professor Gaukroger was known for his work in the history of philosophy (especially Descartes) and the history and philosophy of science, authoring 14 books, editing another 12, as well as a substantial number of articles. Among his recent books are The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay (Princeton University Press, 2020) and The Genealogy of Knowledge: Analytical Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2019). He also produced what has been described as a quartet of books on the theme of “science and the shaping of modernity”: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (2006), The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility (2010), The Natural and the Human (2016) and Civilization and the Culture of Science (2020) (all with Oxford University Press). You can learn more about his research here and here.

Professor Gaukroger joined the University of Sydney faculty in 1981. Prior to that, he held research fellowships at the University of Melbourne and Cambridge University. He earned his PhD from Cambridge, and his BA from the University of London.

In a memorial notice published at the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is remembered as “a strongly independent thinker…  intellectually adventurous with an enormous range” who has “left a lasting legacy in Australian intellectual life.”

He died on September 3rd.