Adolf Grünbaum (1923–2018)

Adolf Grünbaum was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. In 1938, following increasing Nazi persecution, he and his family left the country and emigrated to the USA. Grünbaum spent two years teaching himself English, then enrolled in Wesleyan University in Connecticut. There he received a B.A. degrees with High Distinction in philosophy and in mathematics in 1943. In 1944, during World War II, Grünbaum joined the U.S. Army and became one of the Ritchie Boys, a group of German-speaking intelligence officers trained to interrogate Nazi soldiers and conduct espionage operations. Following his service, he returned to the USA and earned his M.S. degree in physics and his PhD in philosophy from Yale University. In 1950, he joined the Department of Philosophy at Lehigh University and rose to become full professor in 1955. In 1960, Prof. Grünbaum went to the University of Pittsburgh, where he became the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy. That year, he also became the founding director of the Center for Philosophy of Science, which he served as director until 1978. He and the colleagues he recruited made Pitt world-renowned for philosophy, history, and the philosophy of science (so effective was his recruiting that he was nicknamed The Pittsburgh Pirate). Prof. Grünbaum served as president of both the American Philosophical Association and the Philosophy of Science Association. He was president of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS) in 2006-2007. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Prof. Grünbaum's many awards, he received the Senior U.S. Scientist Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1985) and the Order of Merit (Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz) of the Federal Republic of Germany. Prof. Grünbaum was the author of nearly 400 articles and book chapters as well as books on space-time and the critique of psychoanalysis. These included Philosophical Problems of Space and Time (1963), The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), and Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis (1993).