Being Jewish, Adolf Grünbaum's family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and emigrated to the United States.
During this recruitment period the University of Pittsburgh appointed Nicholas Rescher, Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Gale, Nuel Belnap, Alan Ross Anderson, and Gerald Massey, among others.
In 2013, he received an honorary doctorate of philosophy from the University of Cologne and the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz from the Federal Republic of Germany.
[7] Grünbaum did not embrace the prevailing — especially among physical scientists — Popperian philosophy of science, leading to some notoriety in the 1960s after he was ridiculed in print by the physicist Richard Feynman.
[9] Reportedly as a mark of further disdain,[10] Feynman refused to let his name be printed, becoming instead the easily recognizable "Mr.
[8] Some 40 years later, writer Jim Holt would characterize Grünbaum as, in the 1950s, "the foremost thinker about the subtleties of space and time," and as, by the 2000s, "arguably the greatest living philosopher of science."
Holt portrays a rationalist Grünbaum who rejects any hint of mysteriousness in the cosmos (a "great rejector").