Paul Benacerraf
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Paul Benacerraf is an American philosopher of mathematics who taught at Princeton for several decades. He was Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, but then he has been named James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy there, and is now emeritus. Born in Paris, his parents were Sephardic Jews from Morocco. His brother is the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Baruj Benacerraf.
Benacerraf is perhaps best known for his paper What Numbers Could Not Be and for his highly successful anthology on the philosophy of mathematics, co-edited with Hilary Putnam.
In What Numbers Could Not Be, he argues against a Platonist view of mathematics, and for structuralism, on the ground that what is important about numbers is the abstract structures they represent rather than the objects that number words ostensibly refer to .
Publications
Works
- Benacerraf, Paul (1960) Logicism, Some Considerations Princeton, Ph.D. dissertation, University Microfilms.
- Benacerraf, Paul (1965) What Numbers Could Not Be The Philosophical Review, 74:47-73.
- Benacerraf, Paul (1967) [God, the Devil, and Gödel], The Monist, 5l: 9-33.
- Benacerraf, Paul (1973) Mathematical Truth, The Journal of Philosophy, 70: 661-679.
- Benacerraf, Paul (1981) Frege: The Last Logicist, The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, Midwest studies in Philosophy, 6: l7-35.
- Benacerraf, Paul (1985) Skolem and the Skeptic, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 56: 85-ll5.
- Benacerraf, Paul and Putnam, Hilary (eds.) (1983) Philosophy of Mathematics : Selected Readings 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.
Book about Benacerraf
- [Wahrheit und Wissen in der Mathematik. Das Benacerrafsche Dilemma] by Manfred Zimmermann
Papers about benacerraf
- [Benacerraf's Dilema Revisited] by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright
- [Satan stultified: a rejoinder to Paul Benacerraf] by J. R. Lucas
Writings on Benacerraf
- [Benacerraf Interview] by The Dualist and the Stanford Philosophy Department
- ["Whatever I am now, it happened here"] by Caroline Moseley
External Links
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