Emily Grosholz (1950-2026)
Emily Rolfe Grosholz, professor emerita of philosophy, English, and African American studies at Penn State, has died.
Professor Grosholz‘s philosophical work ranged across topics in philosophy of math, philosophy of science, logic, and the history of modern philosophy. She is the author of Starry Reckoning: Reference and Analysis in Mathematics and Cosmology (2016), Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences (2007), Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (1991), and many other works, which you can learn about here and here.
Her academic work was recognized with several honors over the years, including fellowships or grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and elsewhere.
Grosholz was also a distinguished poet, publishing seven volumes of poetry, as well as a book that brought together her philosophical and poetic work: Great Circles: The Transits of Mathematics and Poetry (2018).
Grosholz joined the philosophy faculty at Penn State in 1979. She earned her PhD from Yale and BA from the University of Chicago.
Emily Grosholz died on May 2, 2026.
An obituary is here.
So sorry to hear this. Spent some very useful and enjoyable times with Emily at Leibniz Kongresses back in the day. She was incredibly talented, and very wise. A loss for us all.
Sad news. I took a course with her at Penn State back in the 70s, and I remember her as very devoted to her students. She helped me greatly.
Emily was a generous mentor, caring friend, and intellectually and poetically brilliant. She co-directed my dissertation with dedicated critical attention and remained an engaged mentor even as I moved on to my career. Her former students will miss her greatly and remain grateful for her legacy.
Emily was a colleague and a comrade bar none. Her commitment to her students was unswerving, and her decency and honesty in all matters academic were a boon to peers and juniors both. Old school. We miss her terribly.
She was my HMP teacher when I was an undergrad at Penn State in 1978. The empiricists and the the rationalists fight to a standoff, and then, wait, is that Kant’s music? Great course; I still have my notes from it. We met in a windowless inner room in the Liberal Arts Tower. You can imagine the witticisms this prompted among the sophomores in the course. I remember an air of amused tolerance on her part in response. RIP