Kai Wehmeier

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Kai Frederick Wehmeier (born March 15, 1968 in Summit , New Jersey ) is a German-American logician and philosopher . He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine .

biography

After graduating from high school in 1987 at the Ratsgymnasium in Gladbeck , Wehmeier studied mathematics , mathematical logic and philosophy in Münster , Berkeley , Hagen and Bochum from 1989 . In 1996 he received his doctorate in mathematical logic with the dissertation Semantical Investigations in Intuitionistic First-order Arithmetic with Justus Diller in Münster. He has been researching and teaching at UC Irvine since 2002, initially as an assistant professor, from 2004 as an associate professor and since 2010 as a professor at the Institute for Logic and Philosophy of Science. Since 2013 he has also been the founding director of the Center for the Advancement of Logic, its Philosophy, History, and Applications (C-ALPHA) of the Faculty of Social Sciences there.

research

Wehmeier's work falls mainly into two areas, namely early analytical philosophy (particularly Frege and Wittgenstein ) and philosophical logic (including its relationship to the philosophy of language and metaphysics ).

In Frege research, Wehmeier u. a. known from the proof that Frege's Basic Law V is consistent with a restricted version of the second-level principle of comprehension (the so-called -comprehension), i.e. that Russell's antinomy cannot be derived from such a subsystem of Frege's theory. With reference to Wittgenstein, he presented a specification and expansion of the theory of the identity of the Tractatus as well as a reconstruction of the logic of the N-operator introduced there.

In philosophical logic, Wehmeier v. a. with the modal logic and the problem of its application to natural languages . He argues that traditional modal logic languages ​​are misleading in the sense that they do not adequately take into account the logical roles of the indicative and subjunctive . In his alternative subjunctive modal logic, therefore, z. B. Kripke's modal argument against the characterization theory of proper names as a fallacy . Wehmeier also took the identity theory gained from his analysis of the Tractatus as an opportunity to question the existence of an objective identity relation.

Fonts (selection)

  • Kai F. Wehmeier. 1999. "Consistent Fragments of Basic Laws and the Existence of Non-Logical Objects," Synthesis 121, pp. 309-328.
  • Kai F. Wehmeier. 2004. "In the Mood," Journal of Philosophical Logic 33, pp. 607-630.
  • Kai F. Wehmeier and Peter Schroeder-Heister . 2005. "Frege's Permutation Argument Revisited", Synthesis 147, pp. 43-61.
  • Kai F. Wehmeier. 2012. "How to live without identity --- and why," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90, pp. 761-777.
  • Brian Rogers and Kai F. Wehmeier. 2012. "Tractarian first-order logic: Identity and the N-operator," Review of Symbolic Logic 5, pp. 538-573.
  • Kai F. Wehmeier. 2012. "Subjunctivity and Cross-World Predication," Philosophical Studies 159, pp. 107-122.
  • Kai F. Wehmeier. 2013. "Subjunctivity and Conditionals," The Journal of Philosophy 110, pp. 117-142.

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personal data
SURNAME Wehmeier, Kai
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wehmeier, Kai Frederick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American logician and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Summit, New Jersey