McMullin, Ernan

Ernan is the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, and former chair of the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Notre Dame. With undergraduate degrees in physics and theology, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. He went on to study theoretical physics on a fellowship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he studied with the legendary Erwin Schrödinger, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Louvain in 1954. Ernan is a philosopher of science who has written and lectured on the relationship between cosmology and theology, the role of values in understanding science, and the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. The author of numerous scholarly articles and the editor of a series of monographs on logic, he also has edited ten other books and is the author of Newton on Matter and Activity and The Inference That Makes Science. He is an expert on the life of Galileo and was won numerous prizes and awards. Among other honors, he has won the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Centennial Medal of John Carroll University, the Founder’s Medal of the Metaphysical Society of America, and two Notre Dame faculty awards. In addition, he has served as president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Metaphysical Society of America, the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association.