[05/22] Passing of Ted McGuire

Carl Hempel & Ted McGuire, 1984

[image: Carl Hempel & Ted McGuire, 1984]

With great sadness we report that James Edward (Ted) McGuire passed away on May 12, 2022.  Ted was a founding member of the Pittsburgh HPS Department, hired in 1971 from the University of Leeds, UK to join Larry Laudan who moved from the Pitt History Department.

Ted was a remarkable scholar, mentor and friend.  He is known for upending Newton scholarship by articulating the significance of the unpublished “classical” scholia’s “magical” concerns with theology and chronology for the more “scientific” arguments in The Principia ("Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan'." Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1966 with P. M. Rattansi). Ted was not only a venerable expert on Newton and the 17th century scientific revolution.  He also challenged standard interpretations of Descartes’ dualism (Descartes’ Changing Mind Princeton, 2009 with Peter Machamer), co-founded the HPS Science and Rhetoric program, and published Science Unfettered:  A Philosophical Study in Sociohistorial Ontology (Ohio University Press 2001 with Barbara Tuchanska).  Ted was a beloved teacher, inspiring his students and colleagues with his erudite explorations of early modern science, philosophy and magic.  Ted McGuire was a scholar who lived in the spaces “outside the boxes” of hegemonic approaches to history and philosophy of science.  He will be dearly missed by those who knew him well.

If you have a remembrance of Ted that you would like to share, please send it to Michael Dietrich at mrd98@pitt.edu.