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Philosophy of Mathematics
2004/2005; 2nd Semester
Institute for Logic, Language & Computation
Universiteit van Amsterdam

Instructor: Dr Benedikt Löwe
Vakcode: MolPM6
Time: Wednesday, 17-19
Place: P.018
ECTS credit points: 6
Course language: English
Intended Audience: M.Sc. students of Logic and Mathematics, M.A. students of Philosophy

Objectives. This course is both a course for philosophers (with sufficient formal skills) to learn something about a particular and peculiar branch of philosophy of science dealing with abstract entities, and a course for logicians to see connections between the history and mathematical investigation of logic and their applications in philosophy.

Contents. We cover the basic questions of Philosophy of Mathematics: Ontology - Truth - Knowledge. We discuss the standard approaches towards these questions by the different schools: Platonists, Formalists, Naturalists, Structuralists and others. We also discuss historically important schools of philosophy of mathematics like the logicists and the intuitionists.

Format. Lectures, student presentations, plenary discussions.
Syllabus: PDF-File.
Read the GRE Scoring Guidelines and the GRE Samples for essay writing with grades. (As a rough guideline, benchmark 6 would be 'excellent', benchmark 5 between 'excellent' and 'good', benchmark 4 between 'good' and 'OK', benchmark 3 'OK', and benchmark 2 and benchmark 1 'not OK'.)

Study materials. Stewart Shapiro, Thinking about Mathematics, Oxford University Press 2000 (amazon.de).


Classes:


Last update : May 25th, 2005