Hartry Field

Hartry Hamlin Field (born November 30, 1946 ) is an American philosopher . His focus is on the fields of the philosophy of mathematics , the philosophy of science and the philosophy of logic . He is best known as a representative of a fictionalism regarding mathematical subjects .

Life and academic career

Field received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1967 , and received a master's degree in philosophy from Harvard University the following year . There he did his doctorate under the supervision of Hilary Putnam . His project was an examination of Alfred Tarski's concept of truth . He was awarded his PhD in 1972. His most influential publication from this period is in Theory Change and the Indeterminacy of Reference , where he developed the idea of ​​partial denotation .

As early as 1970, still as a postgraduate, he became a field lecturer at Princeton University as a postdoc assistant professor (1972–1976). Eventually he moved to the University of Southern California as an associate professor ; In 1981 he was appointed professor there. During the 1980s, Field was primarily concerned with the philosophy of mathematics, where he developed a mathematical fictionalism point of view that mathematical judgments are useful fictions, but not literally true or false. Above all, Field denies the existence of mathematical objects such as quantities , which he opposed to Willard Van Orman Quine and his former mentor Hilary Putnam .

Field was a faculty member at the University of Southern California until 1991. Before becoming a Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University in 1997 , he was Distinguished Professor and Kornblith Professor of Science and Values at the Graduate School of the City University of New York (1991 -97). The work of the last few years shows a new focus in the treatment of semantic paradoxes . In 2003 Field was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Honors and visiting professorships

• Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University , 1979
• Visiting Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Spring 1984
• Visiting Research Social Scientist, University of Arizona Cognitive Science Program, Spring 1987
• Tang Chun-I Visiting Professorship, Chinese University of Hong Kong , spring 2012

• Graduate Prize Fellowship, Harvard University, 1967–70
• National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant, 1972-73
• Princeton University Bicentennial Preceptorship, 1973–76
• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 1976–77 (declined)
• National Science Foundation Research Grant, 1979-80
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1979-80
• University of Southern California Nominee for Graves Award for Teaching in the Humanities (1981)
• National Science Foundation Summer Research Grant, 1982
• Mellon Professorship, University of Southern California, 1982-83
• Lakatos Prize (for Science Without Numbers ), 1986
• National Science Foundation Research Grant, 1988-9
• Nelson Lectures, University of Michigan: twice, 1993 and 1999
• Paul Benacerraf Lecture, Princeton University, 1999
• Shearman Lectures, University of London, 2000
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2003
• John Locke Lectures, 2008, Logic, Normativity, and Rational Revisability.

Monographs

• Science Without Numbers , Blackwell, 1980
• Realism, Mathematics and Modality , Blackwell, 1989
• Truth and the Absence of Fact , Oxford University Press 2001
• Saving Truth from Paradox , Oxford University Press, 2008

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Curriculum Vitae as of 2004 ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 111 kB)  
2. ^ Hartry Field, Theory Change and the Indeterminacy of Reference , in: Journal of Philosophy. 70, 14: 462-481
3. ↑ Stephen Yablo , "Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?" (PDF; 152 kB) Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72.1 (1998) p. 231.
4. ↑ Brief curriculum vitae on the Tang Chun-I Visiting Professorship website ( memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Chinese University of Hong Kong 
5. ↑ Curriculum Vitae as of 2004 ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 111 kB).  
6. ↑ Brief curriculum vitae on the Tang Chun-I Visiting Professorship website ( memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Chinese University of Hong Kong, compare the curriculum vitae as of 2004 ( memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 111 kB)  
7. ↑ To the above, compare the curriculum vitae as of 2004 ( Memento of the original from June 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 111 kB) 
8. ^ Website of the John Locke lectures ( Memento of the original from April 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  

Web links

• Homepage at NYU
• John Locke Lectures as a podcast from Oxford University
• Literature by and about Hartry Field in the WorldCat bibliographic database