Dear all, At the next meeting of the SMG we will have Benjamin Marschall (PhD student) presenting a talk entitled ‘Carnap’s Internal Platonism’ (abstract below). As usual it will be on Wednesday (the 20th) from 4.30 to 6pm in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. The talk should last about 45 minutes followed by questions and discussion. All graduate students are welcome.
A full list of speakers for Lent term is available here (Easter term coming soon): https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Abstract: In his Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, Rudolf Carnap famously argued that we can do anything a mathematical Platonist wants - quantify over numbers, hold them to be mind-independent, claim that numerals refer to them - without committing ourselves to any mysterious Platonistic metaphysics. Carnap defends this internal Platonism by construing mathematical statements to be both internal to a linguistic framework and analytic. I will develop an argument first suggested by Beth (1963) according to which the existence of non-standard models of arithmetic undermines Carnap’s method of drawing the analytic/synthetic-distinction, and will furthermore argue that this is a much bigger problem for the account than Carnap himself seems to have realised. I hope to see you there! Nathan Hawkins PhD student in Philosophy Cambridge University _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
