Penelope Maddy

Penelope Jo Maddy (born July 4, 1950 in Tulsa , Oklahoma ) is an American logician and philosopher of science specializing in the philosophy of mathematics .

Maddy went to school in San Diego and was a finalist in the Westinghouse High School Science Contest in 1968. From 1968 she studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley (bachelor's degree in 1972) and from 1974 at Princeton University , where she received her doctorate in philosophy in 1979 (set theoretical realism). She then taught at the University of Notre Dame (Lecturer, from 1979 Assistant Professor) and was from 1983 Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago . Since 1987 she was Associate Professor and from 1979 Professor of Philosophy (from 1989 also for Mathematics) at the University of California, Irvine . In 1998 she switched to the chair for logic and the philosophy of science and is also a professor of mathematics.

Maddy is known for making important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics. Since the 1970s, she has been involved in discussions of the theses of Solomon Feferman on the role of axioms in mathematics.

In Realism in Mathematics she defends the Platonism of Kurt Gödel , who assumed an independent existence of mathematical objects, which was expressed, for example, in his search for new axioms in set theory that make it possible to prove statements such as the continuum hypothesis (as an example, Maddy uses the Book the constructibility axiom by Gödel). She sees the justification for this “ realism ” somewhat differently than Gödel and recognizes in particular the objects of set theory to have a concrete existence. In doing so, she draws on more recent findings in developmental psychology and cognitive science. In Naturalism in Mathematics she takes a slightly different point of view, which she calls naturalism . Taking up ideas from Willard van Orman Quine , Gödel and Ludwig Wittgenstein , she argues that when considering mathematics philosophically, one should keep an eye on applications in mathematics itself and not outside of it, as in philosophy and the natural sciences. According to Maddy, the validity of axioms must therefore be judged from a practical point of view in mathematics.

In 1998 Maddy was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2002 she received the Lakatos Award for her book Naturalism in Mathematics . In 2006 she gave the Gauss lecture of the German Mathematicians Association in Dresden . She has been president of the Association for Symbolic Logic since 2007, and was vice-president from 2001 to 2004.

Fonts

• Realism in Mathematics , Oxford University Press, 1990
• Naturalism in Mathematics , Oxford University Press, 1997
• Second Philosophy - a naturalistic method , Oxford University Press, 2007
• Believing the axioms I and II , The Journal of Symbolic Logic 53, June and September 1988, pp. 481-511 and 736-764 (English)

Web links

• Penelope Maddy - Homepage at UC Irvine (English)
• Penelope Maddy: a philosopher you can count on - Portrait in Scientific American by Laura Vanderkam, January 13, 2009
• Publications by and about Maddy