Hartry Field

Hamlin Hartry Field ( born November 30, 1946) is an American philosopher. His focus is in the areas of philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science and the philosophy of logic. He is primarily known as a representative of fictionalism with respect to mathematical objects.

Life and academic career

Field earned a bachelor's degree in 1967 in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, already in the following year he received the degree of Master of Philosophy at Harvard University. There he received his PhD under the supervision of Hilary Putnam. His project was an exploration of the concept of truth by Alfred Tarski. The PhD was awarded to him in 1972. His most influential publication of this period is in Theory Change and the Indeterminacy of Reference, there he developed the idea of a partial denotation.

As early as 1970, while still a postgraduate, lecturer Field was at Princeton University, as a postdoctoral fellow asisstant professor ( 1972-1976 ). Finally, he became associate professor at the University of Southern California; In 1981 he was appointed professor there. In the 80 years of the twentieth century, Field primarily dealt with the philosophy of mathematics, where he developed a point of view of mathematical fictionalism, according to which mathematical judgments useful fictions, but are not literally be regarded as true or false. Especially Field denies the existence of mathematical objects such as quantities, which he opposed Willard Van Orman Quine and his former mentor Hilary Putnam.

Field was a member of the faculty of the University of Southern California until 1991. Before he finally became the 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 recent years show a new focus in the treatment of semantic paradoxes.

Honors and visiting professorships

  • Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University, 1979
  • Visiting Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spring 1984
  • Visiting Research Scientist Social, 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, in 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
WorldCat Integrated Authority File
377310
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