Penelope Maddy

UCI Distinguished Professor 

of 

Logic & Philosophy of Science 

and of Mathematics

 

Research Interests:

My work begins from methodological questions in the foundations of set theory, especially how new axioms can be properly criticized or defended.  This focused inquiry leads to more general questions in the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics and logic, and the relations of these subjects to natural science.  Progress on all this seems to me to require some attention to the methodology of philosophy itself; I’ve been especially interested in naturalism, but also logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy and its descendents, various ‘therapeutic’ approaches, etc. -- and in radical skepticism as a diagnostic tool for comparing and contrasting these schools of meta-philosophical thought.  This is coupled with an amateur’s historical interest in such figures as Descartes, Hume, Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Moore, Austin, Carnap and Quine.  


A few recent seminars:

Skepticism, naturalism and therapy -- Fall 2007/Winter 2008
Philosophy of Mathematics -- Fall 2006/Winter 2007
Philosophy of Logic -- Fall 2005/Winter 2006
Word - World Connections -- Fall 2004/Winter 2005
Naturalism -- Fall 2003/Winter 2004
Philosophy of logic -- Fall 2002/Winter 2003
Indeterminacy -- Winter 2002
The role of mathematics in applications -- Fall 2001
Fictionalism -- Spring 2001

P. Maddy's Curriculum vitæ
 


 

Selected Bibliography:

'Believing the axioms, Part I' , and 'Believing the axioms, Part II' , Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1988.

Realism in Mathematics, Oxford 1990.

Naturalism in Mathematics, Oxford 1997.

'Naturalism and the a priori', in P. Boghossian and C. Peacocke, eds., New Essays on the A Priori, Oxford, 2000.

'Logic and the discursive intellect', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1999.

'Naturalism: friends and foes', in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 15, Metaphysics 2001, Blackwell 2001.

'Some naturalistic reflections on set theoretic method', Topoi, 2001.

'A naturalistic look at logic', Proceedings of the APA, November 2002.

'Three forms of naturalism', in S. Shapiro, ed., Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics.

'Second philosophy',  Lakatos Award Lecture, published in Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, July-September 2003

'Mathematical existence', Bulletin of Symbolic Logic,  September 2005.

Second Philosophy, Oxford 2007.

'How applied mathematics became pure', The Review of Sybolic Logic, 2008.

Contact Information

Office: SST 759
Phone: (949) 824-4133
Email: pjmaddy@uci.edu