During this time, Morris had the bad fortune to fall in with the physicist, philosopher, and historian Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996). The program was “sort of a consolation prize,” in his defensive version, for being rejected from Harvard’s history of science program. “ The Ashtray” centers on Morris’s brief stint as a graduate student - he lasted a year - in what was then Princeton’s Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. But if this was revenge, it was revenge of a strange sort, taking the form of extended diatribes against postmodernism, the historiography of science, and Kuhn’s classic work on scientific revolutions. It was as though, after nearly forty years since his run-in with Kuhn at Princeton, the time had come for revenge. Morris now seemed not fascinated or amused - his usual registers - but angry. As the documentarian behind such films as Gates of Heaven (the one about the pet cemetery), The Thin Blue Line (the one that introduced re-enactment into true-crime docs), and The Fog of War (the one with Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara), Morris has been given a wide berth to explore his interests in public.īut the articles about Thomas Kuhn, collectively titled “The Ashtray,” and now reworked into the book The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), seemed rawer than usual. Taken by itself, this sort of flamboyant anecdote seems like pure Morris, consonant with the other series he has published with the New York Times as part of their Opinionator section - series that have explored, among other things, the hagiography of Abraham Lincoln, the perceived credibility of various typefaces, and the contrasts between photographic evidence and photographic art. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. ![]() The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In 2011, the filmmaker and writer Errol Morris published a series of five articles that may rank as the oddest production of his long and varied career.
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