In this talk, I shall critically discuss some issues related to Frege’s notion of logical object and his paradigms of second-order abstraction principles: Hume’s Principle and especially Axiom V. The focus is on the referential indeterminacy of value-range terms, Frege’s attempt to remove it as well as on his subsequent proof of referentiality for his formal language. Special attention will be paid to the assumptions that underly his overall strategy.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 13 Nov 2014
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Matthias Schirn, University of Munich
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker:

Matthias Schirn  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich. His research interests are in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, proof theory, the philosophy of language, intensional semantics, epistemology and the philosophies of Kant, Frege, Hilbert, Russell and Wittgenstein. He also taught at the universities of Oxford (1976, 2014), Michigan State (1976-77), Cambridge (1977-78), Minnesota (1989), the State University of Campinas (1991), the National University of Buenos Aires (1992), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1993, 1994, 1997), the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza (2003), the National University San Marcos in Lima (2009) and numerous other universities in Europe and Latin America. He gave invited talks at many of the most prestigious universities in Europe, the United States of America, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Since 2012 he is a member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He has published in Mind, Synthese, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Dialectica, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Reports on Mathematical Logic, History and Philosophy of Logic, Logique et Analyse, Axiomathes, Theoria, Kantstudien, and other international journals. He is currently preparing two books on Frege’s philosophy and his logic.