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173Alan Weir. Truth through Proof: A Formalist Foundation for Mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-954149-2. Pp. xiv+281: Critical Studies/Book Reviews (review)Philosophia Mathematica 19 (2): 213-219. 2011.Alan Weir’s new book is, like Darwin’s Origin of Species, ‘one long argument’. The author has devised a new kind of have-it-both-ways philosophy of mathematics, supposed to allow him to say out of one side of his mouth that the integer 1,000,000 exists and even that the cardinal ℵω exists, while saying out of the other side of his mouth that no numbers exist at all, and the whole book is devoted to an exposition and defense of this new view. The view is presented in the book in a way that can ma…Read more
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69One textbook may introduce the real numbers in Cantor’s way, and another in Dedekind’s, and the mathematical community as a whole will be completely indifferent to the choice between the two. This sort of phenomenon was famously called to the attention of philosophers by Paul Benacerraf. It will be argued that structuralism in philosophy of mathematics is a mistake, a generalization of Benacerraf’s observation in the wrong direction, resulting from philosophers’ preoccupation with ontology.
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16Careful choices---a last word on Borel selectorsNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 22 (3): 219-226. 1981.
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36No requirement of relevanceIn Stewart Shapiro (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, Oxford University Press. pp. 727--750. 2005.There are schools of logicians who claim that an argument is not valid unless the conclusion is relevant to the premises. In particular, relevance logicians reject the classical theses that anything follows from a contradiction and that a logical truth follows from everything. This chapter critically evaluates several different motivations for relevance logic, and several systems of relevance logic, finding them all wanting.
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32Synthetic mechanics revisitedJournal of Philosophical Logic 20 (2). 1991.Earlier results on eliminating numerical objects from physical theories are extended to results on eliminating geometrical objects
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47KripkePolity. 2012.Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, _Naming and Necessity_, reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection _Philosophical Troubles_. In this book Kripke’s long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. B…Read more
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