The History of Science Society

Vol. 40, No.2, April 2011
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In Memoriam

David B. Kitts (1923–2010)

David B. Kitts, long a member of the History of Science program at the University of Oklahoma, died at Norman, OK on 30 October 2010 at the age of 87. Trained in zoology — he earned his PhD at Columbia University (1953), supervised by George Gaylord Simpson — Kitts began his career as a geologist and paleontologist. As early as his college years at Penn, he cultivated an interest in the logical and conceptual structure of science, which led him to important and influential analyses of the foundations of geological and biological thinking. While doing research in vertebrate paleontology at OU, he explored these interests further by teaching a new course, Metageology, and began a long-term affiliation with the History of Science program.

A collection of his main papers on the underpinnings of geological thought, The Structure of Geology (published in 1977), was a pioneering work in turning attention in twentieth-century philosophy of science to the logical and historical processes in geological reasoning. His research in the philosophy of biology centered first on the concept of biological species, then on the logical structure of Darwin’s argument in The Origin of Species, a subject he continued to investigate for many years after his retirement in 1988. In this work, as in the philosophy of geology, he closely analyzed historical and contemporary scientific and philosophical texts in order to inform philosophical claims with historical accuracy. In 1966 Kitts was named David Ross Boyd Professor, an appointment recognizing the institution’s finest teachers. He divided his instructional time at OU between Geology and History of Science until assuming a full-time appointment in 1978 in the History of Science Department, in which he served as department chair from 1973 to 1979. Over a hundred family members, colleagues and friends gathered in Norman on 5 February 2011 for a memorial tribute to David B. Kitts and a reception hosted by his wife Nancy and his sons Peter and David. Following Ken Taylor’s opening remarks on David’s life and work, punctuated with stories of his personal qualities and legendary foibles, there followed a dozen short recollections of David’s teaching, writing, field work, cycling, camping, sculling, and vacation travels. Among these were stories from his history-of-science colleagues and former students Marilyn Ogilvie, Steve Livesey, Liba Taub, Bob Nye, and Mary Jo Nye. The snow drifts beneath the brilliant blue sky of an Oklahoma winter day provided a beautiful setting for celebrating David’s life.

Mary Jo Nye, Oregon State University
Ken Taylor, University of Oklahoma

Alexander M. Ospovat (1923–2010)

Alexander Meier Ospovat died 21 December 2010, at Stillwater, Oklahoma. He was a member of the History Department at Oklahoma State University from 1962 until his retirement in 1988.

Born in 1923 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Ospovat spent most of his childhood in Memel, Lithuania. In 1940 his family fled, first to Mexico, then to the US. Ospovat earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Oklahoma in 1945. Following several years of employment as an engineer, he returned to school and earned his PhD in 1960. He was the first to complete the OU doctoral program in history of science.

At Oklahoma State Ospovat taught history of science and medicine, and early modern European history. His research focused primarily on the development of geology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is particularly well known for his research on the geological career and thought of Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817). His was a pioneering voice in revising the negative judgments on Werner that had been taken in most British and American histories of geology since the time of Charles Lyell. In recognition of his contributions to the history of geology Ospovat received an honorary doctorate from the Bergakademie Freiberg (1990).

Ken Taylor, University of Oklahoma

Harry M. Marks (1947–2011)

Professor Harry M. Marks, PhD, 64, died at his home in Baltimore on 25 January 2011. Professor Marks was the Elizabeth Treide & A. McGehee Harvey Professor in the History of Medicine in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He also held joint appointments in The Krieger School’s department of History and Anthropology and in the School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology. A get-together of friends and colleagues took place at the Institute of the History of Medicine on Feb. 5 from noon to 2 p.m.

Rev. Ernan McMullin (1924–2011)

Ernan McMullin, John Cardinal O’Hara Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, died 8 February 2011 at Letterkenny General Hospital in Donegal, Ireland. He was 86 years old. A native of Ballybofey, Donegal, Father McMullin was an internationally prominent scholar in the philosophy of science. He studied physics at the National University of Ireland under the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger and theology at Maynooth College before being ordained a priest in 1949 and receiving his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Louvain in 1954. He joined the Notre Dame faculty the same year, and for the next half century proceeded to explain that decision by praising the then-new president who had recruited him. "Father Ted Hesburgh could charm a bird out of a tree," he would say. At Notre Dame, Father McMullin chaired the philosophy department from 1965 to 1972 and served as director of the history and philosophy of science program and of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Human Values before retiring in 1994, continuing to teach on the graduate level until 2003. For the last seven years, he lived in both St. Paul, Minn. and Donegal. "Ernan McMullin was a good priest, a good philosopher and a good friend to generations of Notre Dame students and teachers," said David Solomon, director of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture. "One of the giants of Notre Dame, his thought and personality transformed and dominated the philosophy department for almost half a century."

Father McMullin wrote and lectured widely on subjects ranging from the relationship between cosmology and theology to the role of values in understanding science to the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. He was also an unrivalled expert on the life of Galileo. The author of some 200 articles in scholarly and popular journals, Father McMullin also published 14 books including The Concept of Matter; Galileo: Man of Science; Newton on Matter and Activity; The Inference That Makes Science; and The Church and Galileo. During his career, Father McMullin held visiting appointments at the University of Minnesota, the University of Cape Town, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Princeton and Yale Universities. He also served on numerous scholarly committees and congresses worldwide and is the only person ever to have been elected president of all the following professional organizations: the American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy of Science Association, the Metaphysical Society of America and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. His numerous awards include honorary degrees from Maynooth, the National University of Ireland, Loyola University in Chicago, Stonehill College, and Notre Dame.

Michael O. Garvey, public information and communications, University of Notre Dame

Magda Whitrow (1914–2011)

Magda Whitrow, the editor of the first Isis Cumulative Bibliography, which was published in six volumes from 1971 to 1984, passed away in early February of this year. Her bibliography indexed over 100,000 citations in over ninety annual and semi-annual bibliographies.

Whitrow recognized the significant role played by the Isis bibliography in the discipline. Her creation of the cumulative bibliography grew out of a conversation between Whitrow, then a librarian at Imperial College, London, and the editor of Isis at that time, Harry Woolf. Instead of simply indexing the articles in Isis as some people wished, the Society embarked on this cumulation project with grants from the National Science Foundation and the United States Steel Foundation.

Whitrow carefully studied George Sarton’s classification systems and then developed a much more detailed, faceted structure from it as a basis for indexing. The resulting product was original and proved to be extraordinarily useful. Her classification scheme became the basis of indexing for all subsequent cumulative bibliographies, edited by John Neu, and formed the core of Neu’s indexing scheme for the HSTM database. The Whitrow system turned out to be easily adaptable to the rapidly developing digital database format.

By forging this new and much more complex scheme, Whitrow laid the groundwork for bibliographical work in our field that continues to underlie both print and electronic bibliographies today.

Further Information:
http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/isp/whitrow2.htm

Archbishop Józef Mirosław Życiński (1948–2011)

Archbishop Józef Mirosław Życiński passed suddenly away on 10 February 2011. Archbishop Życiński was born on 1 September 1948 in Stara Wieś (Poland). He was ordained to the priesthood in 1972, completed PhD’s in theology in 1976 at the Pontifical Academy of Theology (Kraków) and in Philosophy in 1978 at the Academy of Catholic Theology (Warsaw); and in 1980 became professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology (subsequently also Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy). In 1990 he became Bishop of Tarnów, and in 1997 Archbishop of Lublin. He also became professor of philosophy and later Grand Chancellor at the Catholic University of Lublin. In collaboration with Pope John Paul II he organized the "Science-Faith" Interdisciplinary Dialogue in Kraków. He published almost 50 books in philosophy of science, relativistic cosmology, and the history of relations between natural sciences and Christian faith, as well as about 350 scientific papers. He was a founder of the journal Philosophy in Science, and of the Philosophy in Science Library series.

By Fr. Tomasz Trafny

History of Science Society

In Memoriam

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