Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Sonja Smets (University of Groningen) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Belief Dynamics under Iterated R...
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Alexandru Baltag (ILLC Amsterdam) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Tracking the Truth Requires a Non-we...
MCMP Workshop on Modality, Ed Zalta (Stanford) gives a talk at the MCMP Workshop on Modality titled "Possible Worlds, The Lewis Principle, and the Myt...
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Accuracy, Chance, and the Pr...
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Douglas Patterson (Universität Leipzig) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Theory and Concept in Tarski's...
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Catarina Duthil-Novaes (ILLC/Amsterdam) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "The 'fitting problem' for logi...
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Volker Halbach (Oxford) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "The conservativity of truth and the disentangl...
Colloquium Mathematical Philosophy, Catarina Duthil-Novaes (ILLC/Amsterdam) gives at talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Cognitive motivations for tre...