Robert Nola (25 June 1940 – 23 October 2022) was a New Zealand philosophy academic, and was an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland.^[1][2] His work focussed on the philosophy and history of science, on epistemology and on metaphysics.

Early life

Nola's mother was New Zealand-born and his father was an immigrant from Dalmatia in Croatia. His family were nominally Catholic, his mother becoming a Catholic to marry his father. Nola attended a state school, rather than a Catholic school. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Auckland.^[3]

Academic career

After a 1968 PhD titled Theoretical change in the physical sciences: a study of theory reduction and theory replacement in science at the Australian National University, Nola moved to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor.^[1]

Nola was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2009 and was a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of the Humanities.^[4]

In July 2021, in the context of a review of the NCEA (New Zealand's National Curriculum), Nola, along with six other University of Auckland Professors and Emeritus Professors published a controversial letter "In Defence of Science" in the New Zealand Listener.^[5] Along with Professor Garth Cooper, Nola resigned from the Royal Society Te Āparangi in March 2022 regarding the controversy.^[6]

Selected works

• Nola, Robert (1988). Relativism and Realism in Science. Springer.
• Nola, Robert (1998). Foucault. F. Cass.
• Nola, Robert, and Howard Sankey (2000). After Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend: Recent Issues in Theories of Scientific Method. Springer.
• Nola, Robert (2003). Rescuing Reason: A Critique of Anti-rationalist Views of Science and Knowledge. Kluwer.
• Nola, Robert, and Gürol Irzik (2006). Philosophy, Science, Education and Culture. Vol. 28. Springer Science & Business Media.
• David Braddon-Mitchell, Robert Nola (2008). "Introducing the Canberra Plan". In Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism. MIT Press.
• Irzik, Gürol, and Robert Nola (2011). "A family resemblance approach to the nature of science for science education". Science & Education 20, no. 7: 591-607.
• Nola, Robert, and Howard Sankey (2014). Theories of Scientific Method: An Introduction. Routledge.
• Irzik, Gürol, and Robert Nola (2014). "New directions for nature of science research". In International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching, pp. 999–1021. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Nola, R. (2018). Demystifying Religious Belief. In H. van Eyghen, R. Peels, G. van den Brink (Eds.) New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion: The Rationality of Religious Belief (pp. 71-92). Heidelberg: Springer.
• Nola, R. (2019). Definition: Atheism. In J. Koterski, G. Oppy (Eds.) Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy (pp. 19-34). Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA.

References