David Hawkins (philosopher)

David Hawkins

David Hawkins (born February 28, 1913 in El Paso , Texas , † February 24, 2002 in Boulder , Colorado ) was an American philosopher . He dealt with the philosophy of science as well as the pedagogy of mathematics and physics.

Life

David Hawkins, whose father William Ashton Hawkins was a lawyer and one of the founders of Alamogordo , studied philosophy at Stanford University ( bachelor's degree in 1934, master's degree in 1936) and received his doctorate in probability theory from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940 ( The casual interpretation of probability ). He then taught at Berkeley. In the Second World War he was from 1943 official historian with the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and administrative assistant to Robert Oppenheimer , whom he still knew from Berkeley. He is also said to have chosen the location of the Trinity test , but was not present at the test itself and was soon critical of nuclear weapons. He became Associate Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University and from 1947 at the University of Colorado at Boulder , where he received a full professorship in 1949 and stayed for the rest of his career. From 1965 to 1970 he headed the Elementary Science Advisory Center there . From 1980 he was Philip A. Danielson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy there . In 1982 he retired.

In 1969/70 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study . He has also been visiting professor at Berkeley, the University of North Carolina , Cornell University , Simon Fraser University , the University of Michigan, and the University of Rome .

In 1950 he had to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities , where he admitted that he and his wife were members of the Communist Party from 1930 to 1942 ; but he refused to name any other party members. He was only just able to keep his professorship at the University of California.

Hawkins was a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists . He had been married to Frances Pockman, a recognized educator, since 1937, with whom he had a daughter. With her he founded the Mountain View Center for Environmental Education at the University of Colorado in 1970 , where elementary school teachers were trained. The institute was supported by the Ford Foundation and the university and has a national reputation in the USA. A central point, which was also expressed in the name of the institute, was the consideration of the child's living environment. They published the quarterly magazine Outlook .

In 1949 he and Herbert A. Simon developed the Hawkins-Simon condition in macroeconomics . In 1981 he became a MacArthur Fellow . In 1995 he gave the Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture in Los Alamos. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . From 1971 to 1977 he was on the Smithsonian Council .

Fonts

• The Language of Nature: An Essay on the Philosophy of Science . Freeman, San Francisco 1964
• The Informed Vision, Essays on Learning and Human Nature . New York, Agathon 1974
• The science and ethics of equality . Basic Books 1977
• The Roots of Literacy . 2000

Web links

• Obituary at the University of Colorado Press ( March 1, 2012 memento on the Internet Archive )
• Obituary at the NY Times
• David Hawkins Papers, University of Colorado at Boulder Library