In Appreciation of Abner Shimony (original) (raw)

2015, arXiv (Cornell University)

Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions with an open, agile and critical mind, something quickly evident to anyone who had the privilege of conversing with him. His choice of problems to pursue, which for the most part involved epistemology and the relationships between mind, matter and space-time, was visionary. His standards, brought continually to bear, were sterling. He was also a charitable man, with great concern for the well being of others, and was politically active, particularly in promoting international peace in the 1980s. The work of Abner Shimony was driven in no respect by fashion, but by curiousity coupled with a sense of intellectual urgency. He possessed a rarely found range of sophisticated tools necessary for attacking interdisciplinary questions in the foundations of the human conception of the world, arguably one of the few with such capacity since the time of Descartes. He also saw morality in intellectual endeavors as of prime significance, as evidenced in his view that the moral character of his friend John Bell was primarily responsible for his discovery of Bell's Theorem. This character was something the two friends shared, Shimony considering Bell one of the most rigorously honest thinkers of all time. 1 Shimony possessed a singular manner of speaking and of precise English usage finely tuned to his task, communicating ideas with the highest fidelity; one who had the privilege of hearing him speak or conversing