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Research Areas:
Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic; Philosophy of Science; History of Analytic Philosophy
Areas of Competence:
Mathematical Logic; Philosophy of Language
Other Areas of Interests:
Aesthetics; Historical Epistemology
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Short Description:
My research over the last 12-15 years has been concentrated in three related areas: the philosophy of mathematics (logicist and structuralist views, mathematical knowledge); the history and philosophy of logic (notions of completeness, the rise of metalogic); and early analytic philosophy (especially Frege, Wittgenstein, and Carnap, conceptions of analytic philosophy). During the last 5 years, I have also branched out into two other areas: the philosophy of science (theories of explanation, conceptual development); late 19th- and early 20th-century philosophy more generally (Cassirer, partly Husserl and Peirce). In my work, I tend to combine considerations of historical figures and developments with contributions to contemporary debates; I don't make a strict distinction between doing history of philosophy (or of logic, mathematics, and science) and doing philosophy itself. I am also often interested in connections between relatively narrow questions arising out of the exact sciences and broader questions about language, reasoning, and experience (revolving around the notions of objectivity, structure, infinity, analysis, explanation, understanding, and meaning). More on the side, I like to think about questions in aesthetics (the significance of asthetic judgments and the role of the imagination, in science, music, and everyday life).
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Current Research:
Articles and Talks:
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"Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics", for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. Zalta, main editor (in progress)
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"Structuralism and its Roots: Comments on Charles Parsons' Mathematical Thought and its Objects", for an author-meets-critics session at the Pacific APA Meeting, San Francisco, April 2010 (in preparation)
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"Frege or Dedekind? On the Nature and Purpose of Logicism", for The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy, E. Reck, ed. (in progress)
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"Carnap, Logicism, and the Pragmatics of Explication", for the conference Logical and Rational Reconstructions of Science from a Pragmatic Point of View, University of Nancy, France, March 2010 (in progress)
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"Carnapian Explication and its Rivals: A Case Study", for the proceedings of the conference, Carnap's Ideal of Explication, held at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon), France, May 2009 (in progress)
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"Hempel, Carnap, and the Covering Law Model", for the proceedings of the conference Projekt Berliner Gruppe, held at the University of Paderborn, Germany, September 2009 (in progress)
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"Cassirer, Dedekind, and the Structuralist Conception of Mathematics", for the conference The Kantian Legacy in the Philosophy of Mathematics: between neo-Kantianism and Logical Empiricism, Turin, Italy, May 2010 (in preparation)
Edited Book:
- The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy, London: Palgrave Macmillan (in progress)
Monographs:
- Dedekind and the Structuralist Transformation of Modern Mathematics (in progress)
Textbook:
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And beyond:
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