Barry Loewer

When David Loewer was an undergraduate at Amherst College, he was bugging his physics professor about what probability means and his history professor about counterfactuals (“if Kennedy had not been assassinated then the Vietnam war…..”) and they sent him to the philosophy department. There they took such questions seriously but they didn’t provide answers. One of his teachers (Joe Epstein) told him that he would have to find answers for himself and that it would take a long time if ever. He is still thinking about them. On Epstein’s advice he went to grad school at Stanford intending to do logic and philosophy of physics with Patrick Suppes. He ended up writing a dissertation on modality and the semantics of names with Jaakko Hintikka. His first job was at the University of South Carolina where he met David Albert and got back to Philosophy of Physics co-authoring with David papers on philosophy of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. Currently David and he are co-PIs for a big project in Philosophy of Cosmology. He moved to Rutgers in 1989 and has been chair and grad director. He usually teaches courses and seminars in philosophy of science and philosophical logic.