Michael Friedman (philosopher)
American philosopher (1947–2025)
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Friedman earned his BA from Queens College, City University of New York in 1969 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1973. Before moving to Stanford in 2002, Friedman taught at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Indiana University, and UC Berkeley as a visiting professor.
Friedman was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences from 1997 until his death in 2025. In 2024 he was elected an honorary member of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science (AIPS). Four of his articles have been selected as among the "ten best" of their year by The Philosopher's Annual.
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Philosophical work
Friedman's early work was on the nature of scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics. His first book, Foundations of Space-Time Theories, was published by Princeton University Press in 1983 won the Matchette Prize (now known as the Book Prize) from the American Philosophical Association, to recognize work by a younger scholar. It also won the Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics to recognize outstanding work in philosophy of science.
Kant and the Exact Sciences was described in Philosophical Review as "a very important book," "required reading for researchers on the relation between the exact sciences and Kant's philosophy."
UC Berkeley German philosophy professor Hans Sluga described Friedman's 2000 book A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, a book that detailed the philosophies of Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, as "eye-opening" and "ambitious". The book shed new light on the split between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy.
In his book Dynamics of Reason, Friedman "provides the fullest account to date not only of [his] neo-Kantian, historicized, dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles of mathematics and physics, but also of the pivotal role that [he] sees philosophy as playing in making scientific revolutions rational."
In 2015, he was awarded the Fernando Gil International Prize for the Philosophy of Science for his book Kant's Construction of Nature.
Friedman was an honorary professor at the University of Western Ontario.
Personal life and death
Friedman was married to Graciela De Pierris, a professor of philosophy at Stanford who has published work on early modern philosophy.
Friedman died in Stanford on March 24, 2025, at the age of 77.