George Boolos

George Stephen Boolos (born September 4, 1940 in New York , † May 27, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts ) was an American philosopher and logician .

Life

In 1961 Boolos made a BA in mathematics from Princeton University , 1963 a B. Phil. from Oxford University , 1966 Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This was the first Ph.D. in Philosophy awarded by MIT, Hilary Putnam was the PhD supervisor . Boolos was a teacher at Columbia University for three years . From 1969 he taught at MIT until he died of cancer .

Initially, Boolos dealt with the expansion of Kurt Gödel 's logic of proof.

Later he dealt intensively with Gottlob Frege . Together with Crispin Wright , he proved the consistency of a modified system of Frege's basic laws : If one replaces the basic law of value processes with Hume's principle , one avoids Russell's antinomy . This is how the two founded neo- logicism .

In 1992, Boolos was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Works by Boolos

• 2007 (1974) (with Richard Jeffrey ). Computability and Logic . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 1979. The Unprovability of Consistency: An Essay in Modal Logic . Cambridge University Press.
• 1990 (editor). Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam . Cambridge University Press.
• 1993. The Logic of Provability . Cambridge University Press.
• 1998 ( Richard Jeffrey and John P. Burgess , eds.). Logic, Logic, and Logic . Harvard University Press.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ MIT faculty resolution on Boolos' death

literature

• Peter Simons (1982). "On understanding Lesniewski," History and Philosophy of Logic .
• Solomon Feferman (1960). "Arithmetization of metamathematics in a general setting," Fundamentae Mathematica , vol. 49, pp. 35-92.

Web links

• MIT memorial page for George Boolos
• George Boolos. The hardest logic puzzle ever. The Harvard Review of Philosophy, 6: 62–65, 1996. (PDF file; 177 kB)