Lawrence (Larry) Sklar, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Michigan, has died.

Professor Sklar was well-known for his work in philosophy of science and physics. He is the author of six books, including Philosophy and the Foundations of Dynamics  (2012), Theory and Truth: Philosophical Critique within Foundational Science (2000), Physics and Chance: Philosophical Issues in the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (1993), and Space, Time and Spacetime (1977), among others, as well as around 200 articles. You can learn more about his writing here.

Sklar joined the University of Michigan philosophy faculty in 1968 and retired in 2016. Prior to that, he held positions at Princeton University and Swarthmore College. He held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, UCLA, and Wayne State University. He earned his PhD and MA at Princeton and his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College.

In a memorial notice published at the University of Michigan Philosophy Department website, Gordon Belot writes:

Larry combined to an unparalleled degree the desire and ability to write about his subject clearly and accessibly with a magisterial understanding of many disparate scientific fields and with a searching philosophical intellect. He provided readers with detailed and illuminating maps of difficult terrain in which empirical, conceptual, and mathematical considerations are often entangled with each other. He seldom seemed interested in settling philosophical debates. Rather, in most of his work, he aimed to make progress in philosophy by clarifying the questions at hand, by investigating the dialectical resources available to partisans of various positions, and by highlighting the extent to which apparently compelling appeals to empirical and mathematical considerations usually also rely crucially on underlying philosophical commitments.  

You can read the full memorial notice here.

(via Laura Ruetsche)