Robert (Bob) Sonné Cohen was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Physics at Boston University and cofounder of the BU Center for Philosophy & History of Science

Bob was born in New York City on February 18, 1923. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he met Adolf Grünbaum. The two friends would go on to found two of the most important centers for philosophy of science in the world—“Bobby” at BU and “Adi” at Pittsburgh. Bob went to Wesleyan University in 1939 (joined shortly thereafter by both Grünbaum and Gerald Holton) obtaining his B.Sc. in physics in 1943. He went on to graduate school at Yale, receiving his Ph.D. in physics in 1948, having taken many philosophy courses, including Kantian philosophy with Ernst Cassirer who had recently arrived at Yale.

Bob was an assistant professor of physics and philosophy at Wesleyan from 1949 to 1957, after which he moved to Boston University, first as an associate professor of physics from 1957 to 1959, and then as a professor of both philosophy and physics from 1959 until his retirement in 1993. During his time at BU, he served as Chair of the Physics Department from 1959 to 1973, Chair of the Philosophy Department from 1986 to 1988, and Acting Dean of the College during the 1971-1972 academic year. He helped recruit many prominent scholars to BU, including Abner Shimony in 1968 and Alasdair MacIntyre in 1972. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Polish, Yugoslav, and Hungarian Academies of Sciences, and a Fellow of the AAAS. He held visiting appointments at MIT, Brandeis, the University of California – San Diego, and Yale, and was a research fellow in history of science at Harvard University.

Without a doubt, the two greatest achievements of Bob’s career are the founding of the Boston University Center for Philosophy & History of Science and the launch of the book series Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, both of which have had a transformative and lasting impact on the field. The Center was founded by Bob in 1960, along with his Philosophy Department colleague Marx Wartofsky, as an interdisciplinary, interuniversity collaboration, based at Boston University. Bob served as Director of the Center from 1960 until 1993, when he became Director Emeritus.

The heart of the Center’s activities is the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, now in its 57th annual program, which brings together dozens of top scholars from around the world every year to discuss the history, conceptual foundations, and methodologies of the sciences. Bob brought together towering figures in the field, such as Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Mary Hesse, Williard van Orman Quine, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, Isaac Asimov, Paul Dirac, Alonzo Church, Marvin Minsky, Benoit Mandelbrot, and many more. The colloquia not only helped stimulate these thinkers’ research, but also helped the philosophy of science grow and blossom as a field by educating the next generation of scholars.

Particularly noteworthy is the role that Bob played in helping to establish the field of philosophy of science around the world. To this end, he organized a number of Boston Studies volumes such as Polish Studies in the Philosophy of Science (1982), Italian Studies (1982), Greek Studies (1990), Taiwan (1993), Mexican Studies (1995), Chinese Studies (1996), Spanish Studies (1996), Japanese Studies (1998), Estonian Studies (2001), Bulgarian Studies (2003), Turkish Studies (2005), and Brazilian Studies (2011). These volumes served to help coalesce a community of researchers in each of these countries and help introduce their work to the rest of the world.