"I first met Michael when I gave my job talk at IU in 1995. Or rather, he met me, because in those pre-internet days, I knew he was in the audience but did not know what he looked like.

Presumably he liked my talk, on Caroline of Ansbach and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, since I was offered the job in our department.

He later told me that Ed Grant had alerted him to my book, Equivalence and Priority. Newton versus Leibniz. The first section, titled "The Cassirer Thesis", caught his eye: in it I followed Cassirer in arguing for a link between Kepler and Leibniz.

As chair, Michael gained the respect and trust of everyone, both historians and philosophers, for his genuine commitment to integrating history and philosophy.

A few years after Michael left Bloomington for Stanford it was my turn to serve as chair, and Michael was my model.

Michael was a keen cyclist. He often talked with fellow cyclists, graduate students and colleagues, about technical biking matters that then made little sense to me. 

In those days I started swimming but then had to stop with the pandemic.

It was at that time, with the pools closed, that I took up biking.

When I ride around Bloomington I often think of Michael: I am sure I am following routes that would have been very familiar to him, and I wish we could ride together."

-Domenico Bertoloni-Meli (Indiana University)

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"Michael Friedman was a philosopher's philosopher, a dear colleague, and a friend for nearly forty years. His first book Foundations of Space-Time Theories (1983), discussing philosophical issues in spacetime theories (relationism, conventionalism) within the frame of modern differential geometry, already indicated a unique character of mind, one combining philosophical acuity, historical sensitivity, and technical expertise. His passing has left an enormous gap in the Stanford Department of Philosophy; indeed, in the profession of philosophy worldwide."

-Thomas Ryckman (Stanford University)

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"The community of the Vienna Circle Institute and the Vienna Circle
Society was shocked about the message of Michael Friedman's death. From
the beginning of our activities in 1991 Michael participated in several
conferences with subsequent publications in our book series. One
highlight was his role as an instructor for our 4th summer university on
'the quest for objectivity' in 2004, together with John Beatty and Helen
Longino.

I personally was very much impressed by Michael's scholarly expertise
and creativity bridging the gap between continental (Kant, Cassirer))
and analytic philosophy of science (Logical Empiricism) as documented in
his book 'A Parting of the ways' (2000), which was translated into
German by a working group of analytic philosophy at the Department of
Philosophy directed by my colleague Elisabeth Nemeth in 2004. He was
paving the way to the integration of history and philosophy of science
(HPS) and enriching the history of philosophy of science (HOPOS). In
addition, I very much appreciated Michael's inviting as well as
professional way of lecturing and discussing. I remember his pioneering
lectures on Carnap's 'Aufbau' (published in German 1997), his
participation in HOPOS 2000 in Vienna, also as a speaker of the
distinguished 8th Vienna Circle Lecture on 'The Idea of Scientific
Philosophy', which was published as 'Kant, Kuhn, and the Rationality of
Science' (2002). Ten years later Michael contributed to the Carnap
conference with his talk on scientific philosophy from Helmholtz, Carnap
to Quine. Occasionally, he was accompanied by his lovely wife and
excellent philosopher Graciela De Pierris (1950-2024), who lectured in
Vienna on Quine in 2001, too.

When I met Michael in person several times, I always enjoyed his
presence as a scholar and discussant with a sense of humor. I felt very
much honored to have received his monographs with a dedication.
Regrettably, my last meeting him was only a virtual one on the occasion
of the big Kant Congress 2015 in Vienna, where he presented his recorded
keynote lecture in his unique exact and informative style, but without a
discussion option. I am sure he would have liked our first exhibition on
the Vienna Circle in the main building of the University of Vienna in
the same year as a sort of rehabilitation and appreciation of this
famous Viennese philosophical movement by the University of Vienna.

In the context of our forthcoming conference on the Vienna Circle and
Logical Empiricism in 2026 we scheduled the first 'Michael Friedman
Memorial Lecture', to be delivered by his renowned disciple Alan
Richardson.
I myself, and our philosophical community in Vienna will miss Michael as
an outstanding philosopher and sophisticated man."

-Friedrich Stadler (University of Vienna)

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"Like others of my generation of Vienna Circle scholars I regarded Michael Friedman as a guiding light. Fortunately I had found my calling with Neurath before I first met him as a postdoc in Chicago, so the compatibility of Neurath’s naturalism with Carnap’s post-Neokantian inheritance provided a topic of mutual interest. Again like others of my cohort I found it hard to secure steady academic employment, but Michael always gave encouragement. On the fringes of one APA meeting in New York he took me to lunch. After a long discussion in which I failed to convince him of my Neurathian reading of a particularly delicate set of Carnap passages he noted my disappointment. “Don’t worry,” he said, “this is good work, keep at it!”: a leader in his field proving to me the legitimacy of plural viewpoints in history. I can only hope to have been similarly constructive with my students. Michael was a philosopher of very great brilliance and a true Mensch. He will be missed for a long time."

-Thomas Uebel (Manchester University)

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"As a closeted graduate student in the 1990s, I knew Michael Friedman as the author of an intimidating book with an intimidating title, Foundations of Space-Time Theories:  Relativistic Physics and Philosophy of Science.  Originally, I mistakenly believed that the book’s appendix—also intimidating—was the key to unlocking its many diagrams and heavy use of differential geometry, and indeed slogging through the appendix does enable one, eventually, to follow the mathematics.  Little did I understand, however, that the true key to entire book, and to much of Friedman’s subsequent career, lay in its epigraph, a quotation from Kant to the effect that philosophy can profit enormously from the “real application” of mathematical material to “the objects of philosophy.”  Lucky for me, despite the fact that I had missed the point of the book, Friedman took some notice of my work as a graduate student, a notice that eventually landed me a kind of dream-job as his colleague for a decade at Indiana University, where, over the course of countless discussions with him from the lunch table to the climbing wall, the meaning and value of that epigraph for Friedman and for philosophy slowly dawned on me.  It sums up much of what I owe to him."

-Michael Dickson (University of South Carolina)