Arnold Koslow (1933-2024)
Arnold Koslow, emeritus professor of philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, died last month.
Professor Koslow worked in the philosophy and history of Science, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. He is the author of, among other works, Laws and Explanations: Theories and Modal Possibilituies (2019), A Structuralist Theory of Logic (1992), and The Changeless Order: The Physics of Space, Time and Motion (1967). You can learn more about his writings here.
Koslow joined the faculty of Brooklyn College/CUNY after receiving his PhD from Columbia University in 1965. He also did some graduate work at Cambridge University. His undergraduate degree is from Columbia.
He died on October 11th, 2024.
Obituary at Louis Suburban Chapel
(via Alyssa Timin)
This is so sad to hear. Arnie was my first advisor in grad school. It might have been romantic of me, but he felt like a living connection to the mid-20th century analytic figures I was most interested in at the time. He was also a warm and supportive and enthusiastic guy, at a time when I really wasn’t getting those vibes elsewhere in my academic life. Rest in peace.
Arnie was a good friend of mine.
His work is directly related to the universal logic project:
https://www.logica-universalis.org/
The road to universal logic vol. 1
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-10193-4
The road to universal logic vol. 2
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-15368-1
He was keynote speaker at the first UNILOG in Montreux in 2005.
Later I visited him at CUNY.
His main work is based on Paul Hertz’s idea of Satzsysteme, from which the work of Gentzen is derived.
See: “A Structuralist Theory of Logic”, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992.
https://philpapers.org/rec/KOSAST-2
and the first chapter of: “Universal Logic: An Anthology, From Paul Hertz to Dov Gabbay”
https://link.springer.com/book/9783034601443