A closet realist

Charles W. Smith

pp. 187-201

in: Kostas Gavroglu, John Stachel, Mark W. Wartofsky (eds), Science, mind and art, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

I first met Bob Cohen at Wesleyan University in the fall of my freshman year in 1956. I had entered Wesleyan with the intention of majoring in physics as part of a pre-med program. While I had always enjoyed history and geography, mathematics and the hard sciences were clearly my first love, due probably in no small way to the fact that I was fairly dyslexic.¹ Wesleyan, in pursuit of its historical emphasis on a critical liberal arts education, had organized a special integrated program of English and philosophy to run with our intensive accelerated mathematics and physics courses. It was clear to all of us, that there was considerable concern that we young scientists not become intellectually overspecialized too soon.