Charles Parsons (philosopher)

Charles Parsons (born April 13, 1933 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) is an American philosopher and mathematician .

life and work

From 1950 Parsons studied mathematics at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1953 summa cum laude . He then studied philosophy at King's College of Cambridge University (1954/55) and at Harvard with a master’s degree in 1956 and a doctorate (Ph.D.) with Willard van Orman Quine in 1961 (dissertation: On Constructive Interpretation of Predicative Mathematics ). From 1958 to 1961 he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. From 1961 he was assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University and from 1962 at Harvard and in 1965 he became associate professor and 1969 professor at Columbia University , where he was head of the faculty of philosophy from 1976 to 1979 and 1985 to 1989. In 1989 he moved as a professor at Harvard University, where he became Edgar Pierce Professor in 1991 . In 2005 he retired.

Between 2002 and 2009 he was also visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles . He was also visiting professor and visiting scholar at Rockefeller University, Heidelberg University, Yale, the University of Pittsburgh, Padua and Chicago. From 1979 to 1980 he was Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and 1986/87 Guggenheim Fellow.

From 1966 to 1990 he was co-editor of the Journal of Philosophy , for which he was subsequently consultant editor. From 1994 to 1998 he was co-editor of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic and from 1980 to 1986 consultant editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. From 1992 he was on the editorial board of Philosophia Mathematica and from 1978 to 1994 of the Journal of Philosophical Logic. From 1989 to 1992 he was President of the Association for Symbolic Logic.

He published on mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics and logic, philosophy of language, Immanuel Kant and historical figures who researched the foundations of mathematics such as Gottlob Frege , David Hilbert , Willard van Orman Quine and Kurt Gödel . With Solomon Feferman and others, he was editor of Volumes 3 to 5 of Gödel's Collected Works. In 2011 he edited the writings of Hao Wang with Montgomery Link .

In 2017 he was a Gödel lecturer .

Fonts

• Mathematics in Philosophy: Selected Essays , Cornell University Press 1983, 2005 (collection of articles)
• Mathematical Thought and its Objects , Cambridge University Press 2008
• From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays , Harvard UP, 2012 (collection of articles)
• Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays , Harvard University Press 2014 (collection of articles)
• Gödel and philosophical idealism , Philosophia Mathematica (3), Volume 18, 2010, pp. 166-192
• Analyticity for realists , in: Juliette Kennedy (Ed.), Interpreting Gödel, Cambridge University Press 2014, pp. 131–150
• Developing arithmetic in set theory without infinity: Some historical remarks , History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 8, 1987, pp. 201-213.
• The structuralist view of mathematical objects , Synthesis, Volume 84, 1990, pp. 303-346.
• The uniqueness of the natural numbers , Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 39, 1990, pp. 13-44
• Infinity and a critical view of logic , Inquiry, Volume 58, 2015, pp. 1-19

literature

• Gila Sher, Richard Tieszen (Eds.): Between Logic and Intuition: Essays in Honor of Charles Parsons , Cambridge UP 2000

Web links

• Homepage, Harvard
• Literature by and about Charles Parsons (philosopher) in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles Parsons in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English) . The dissertation was also published in 1990 by Garland Publishing in New York with a new foreword.
2. ↑ Volume 3 Unpublished Essays and Lectures, Oxford UP 1995, Volumes 4 and 5 Correspondence, Clarendon Press 2003
3. ↑ Hao Wang. Logician and Philosopher, Texts in Philosophy 16, London: College Publ. 2011