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- A friend of the family: Father Ernan McMullin
A death in the family: Father Ernan McMullin
A leading philosopher of science, recruited out of his doctoral studies at Belgium’s University of Louvain in 1954 by a young Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, and remembered by colleagues as “one of the giants of Notre Dame,” has died. Father Ernan McMullin, a native of County Donegal in northwestern Ireland, was a Galileo expert whose hundreds of articles and 14 books on such subjects as the relationship between theology and the cosmos made him, in the words of his friend, colleague and occasional sparring partner, Michael Ruse of Florida State University, “one of the best-known philosophers and historians of science in the past half century.”