John P. Burgess

Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey ~John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy. Contributions to diverse areas of mathematical and philosophical logic, including papers in descriptive set theory, tense logic, and other areas, as well as his books Philosophical Logic (2009) and Truth (with Alexis G. Burgess, 2011). Leading expositor and advocate in philosophy of mathematics of realism (the view that mathematical existence theorems are true) and pragmatism (the view that mathematical theories are human instruments created for human purposes) reconciled by naturalism (the view that there is no first philosophy in a position to correct science). Known especially for opposition to nominalism (the view that there are no mathematical objects), culminating in his catalog of varieties of nominalism and their shortcomings in A Subject With No Object (with Gideon Rosen, 1997). Wrote short surveys on philosophical logic and on contemporary debates in the theory of truth as well as a study of the various neo-Fregean projects in Fixing Frege (2005), which won the Association for Symbolic Logic's Shoenfield Prize. ~~