George E. Smith, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, has died.

Professor Smith was well-known for his work in philosophy of science, especially his scholarship on Newton.

He was an engineer before he was a philosopher, as is recounted in this biographical note on the Tufts website:

He maintained a career as an engineer from the late 1950s until 2013, specializing initially on the development of computer-based methods for the design of jet engines and then, starting in the late 1960s, on failure analysis of jet engines and other turbo machinery.

In the latter capacity he has been hired as an expert witness in legal proceedings in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and France. Smith entered Yale in 1956 to prepare for a career in writing and directing for the theater, only to be waylaid by his first encounter with philosophy in his freshman year. He ended up majoring in philosophy and mathematics, graduating in 1962 after taking two years off to work at General Electric on an experimental jet engine trying to anticipate the 1980s. After a decade of working at Pratt and Whitney Aircraft and Northern Research and Engineering Corporation, he was drawn back to philosophy, first by Vietnam-inspired questions regarding whether political science can become a real science at all, then by questions about what a real science is in the first place.

He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in 1979, having taught methods of computer modeling in MIT’s Political Science Department for two years while a student in philosophy. He joined Tufts’ Philosophy Department in 1977, where his research came to focus on transitional episodes in the history of science in which areas of research have gone from struggling to “turn data into evidence” to achieving extraordinary success in doing so. It was as part of this research that he first taught a two-semester course on Newton’s Principia in the year of its tercentenary, 1986-87.

Several years ago, Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam), a student of Smith’s, wrote about him on the occasion of a conference in honor of him:

George’s scholarship has transformed our understanding of Newton’s Principia and the research that it stimulated over two centuries… and is doing so for a number of other research areas. Yet, while he was trained as a philosopher at MIT in the 1970s (and it shows in the clarity of his prose and the rigor of his arguments), it is very difficult to insert George’s work into standard philosophical debates.

You can learn more about Smith’s writings here and here.

Smith died on November 8th.

UPDATE: There’s a remembrance of Smith by Eric Schliesser here.