Reality and the Ashtray: Errol Morris: The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018, xv 207pp, US$30 (cloth)

Abstract

Errol Morris is a well-known documentary filmmaker and writer. In the early 1970s, Morris was for a time a graduate student in the history of science at Princeton, and later in the philosophy of science at Berkeley. While at Princeton, Morris was a student of T. S. Kuhn. During his time as a student at Princeton, the event which gives the book its name took place. As Morris tells it, he attended a meeting with Kuhn in his office while Kuhn was on leave at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Morris had written a paper on Maxwell’s displacement current for Kuhn’s seminar. Kuhn was critical of the paper. He found Morris’s interpretation of Maxwell to be Whiggish. The discussion turned into an a..