Thinker William Newton-Smith, emeritus fellow of Balliol Faculty, Oxford and founding govt chairman of Central European College, has died.
Newton-Smith was identified for his work in philosophy of science, authoring The Structure of Time (1980) and The Rationality of Science (1981), amongst many different works, a few of which you’ll browse here.
In 1991, Newton-Smith helped discovered Central European College in Prague. In an obituary at Challenge Syndicate, Ben Rawlence offers among the background to this. Within the early Nineteen Eighties Newton-Smith organized for a sequence of philosophers to journey to Prague to present lectures to casual teams, as many departments there had been shuttered by the federal government for being too “radical”. Rawlence writes:
The primary member of workers Newton-Smith selected to ship was Kathy Wilkes, intently adopted by Roger Scruton after which himself. By the point Newton-Smith made his personal go to, the authorities had turn out to be very interested by what was being known as “the underground college.” Samizdat, manually reproduced copies of books, together with philosophy textbooks, have been being handed round, partly financed by Newton-Smith’s casual fundraising and a bunch that might turn out to be the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, of which he was a founding trustee.
In a non-public flat in Prague, in 1980, Newton-Smith was about to deal with a gathering of 20 or so concerning the logic of science when the doorbell rang. A dozen uniformed officers entered to verify identification playing cards, and two in plain garments got here for him. After two hours of interrogation, he was pushed to a snowy border crossing with West Germany in the course of the evening. His expulsion from Czechoslovakia created a world sensation; headlines all over the world boosted the reason for the dissidents.
Newton-Smith spent most of his profession at Oxford. He earned his undergraduate diploma from Queen’s College, his MA from Cornell College, and his DPhil from Balliol Faculty, Oxford.
In a memorial notice on the CEU web site, his colleagues keep in mind him as a “modest, unpretentious, and good individual, who has at all times downplayed his central position in preventing authoritarianism.”
He died on April eighth, 2023.
