Roger B Angel
Roger B. Angel | |
|---|---|
| Residence | Montreal, QC, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Known for | Relativity: The Theory and Its Philosophy (1980) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Philosopher |
| Institutions | Concordia University, Montreal |
Roger B. Angel was a Canadian philosopher of science at Concordia University in Montreal, and the author of Relativity: The Theory and Its Philosophy (Pergamon, 1980), a scientific-realist treatment of the philosophical foundations of special and general relativity.
He was not a critic of relativity. His book defends the theory and directs its criticism at other philosophers — at Adolf Grünbaum's conventionalism about simultaneity, at Kuhn's and Feyerabend's thesis of incommensurability, and at operationalist and a priorist readings of physics. He explicitly rejected both the view that special relativity is self-contradictory and the neo-Lorentzian revival of the aether, writing of the latter that it "amounts to both praising and violating the theory at the same time". His inclusion in this catalogue appears to be an artefact of a bulk import of relativity-related books rather than a considered classification; the point is set out on the book's page.
Career
Angel took his master's degree in philosophy at McGill University in 1961 with a thesis on Henri Poincaré's theory of conventionalism — a subject he would return to twenty years later from the opposite direction — and his doctorate at McGill in 1969 with a thesis titled Relativity and Covariance, which became the core of chapter 10 of his book. He acknowledged Mario Bunge as "my teacher … It was he who first taught me how to understand science and how to philosophize about it", and his work belongs squarely to Bunge's scientific-realist school, though he disagreed with Bunge on the status of general covariance.
He taught at Concordia University in Montreal, thanking colleagues in its physics and mathematics departments in the preface to his book, which is dated Montreal, June 1979.
Concordia's alumni magazine recorded the death of Roger Angel, former professor of philosophy of science at the university, on 22 July 2022 at the age of 89. The notice gives the name without the middle initial; the identification rests on the match of institution, field and dates, and should be treated as very likely rather than certain.
Publications
- "Explanation and Prediction: A Plea for Reason", Philosophy of Science 34, 276–282 (1967).
- "Relativity and Covariance", in Mario Bunge (ed.), The Methodological Unity of Science, D. Reidel, 1973, 53–68.
- Relativity: The Theory and Its Philosophy, Pergamon Press, 1980.
- Review of Roberto Torretti, Philosophy of Geometry from Riemann to Poincaré, Dialogue 21, 384–391 (1982).