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Hannes Leitgeb

Background

Hannes completed a Masters (1997) and a PhD degree (1998) in mathematics and a PhD degree (2001) in philosophy, each at the University of Salzburg, where he later also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy. In 2003 he received an Erwin-Schroedinger Fellowship from the Austrian Research Fund FWF on the basis of which he did research at the Department of Philosophy/CSLI at Stanford University. In 2005 he took up a joint position as a Reader at the Departments of Philosophy and Mathematics in Bristol. In 2007 he became Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. In autumn 2010 Hannes will be leaving Bristol in order to become Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language, and Alexander von Humboldt Professor, at the LMU Munich.

Research Interests

His research interests are in logic (theories of truth and modality, paradox, conditionals, nonmonotonic reasoning, dynamic doxastic logic), epistemology (belief, inference, belief revision, foundations of probability, Bayesianism), philosophy of mathematics (structuralism, informal provability, abstraction, criteria of identity), philosophy of language (indeterminacy of translation, compositionality), cognitive science (symbolic representation and neural networks, metacognition), philosophy of science (empirical content, measurement theory), and history of philosophy (Logical Positivism, Carnap, Quine). He is very much in favour of Formal Philosophy, i.e., the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy.

Further Activities

Hannes is a Managing Editor of Studia Logica, an Associate Editor of Erkenntnis, a Consulting Editor of Theoria, a Consulting Editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic, a Review Editor of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, a Subject Editor in Philosophy of Mathematics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a member of the Editorial Boards of the European Journal for the Philosophy of Science and of the Grazer Philosophical Studies, a member of the Editorial Board of PHIBOOK: The Yearbook of Philosophical Logic, an Editor of The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (Open Court), and an Editor of the LOGOS Book Series on Logic, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Language (Ontos Press). He has (co-)edited special issues of Synthese and Studia Logica. He also runs our colloquia on logic and philosophy of mathematics. In 2006 he co-organised the European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on "Applied Logic in the Methodology of Science", and in 2008 he co-organised the 31st International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg on "Reduction and Elimination" as well as a workshop on "Formal Philosophy" at the ECAP 2008. In 2010 he is co-organising a workshop on "Scientific Philosophy - Past and Future" at Tilburg.

Hannes was the PI of the Bristol Group of a EUROCORES research project on Metacognition which was funded by the European Science Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) from 2006 to 2009, and which also included teams in France, the US, Germany, and Austria (see http://mpscesf.free.fr/). He is one of the founding members of a Research Group on Logical Methods in Epistemology, Semantics, and Philosophy of Mathematics (the "Luxemburger Zirkel") which has been sponsored by the British Academy and the Bristol Institute for Advanced Studies (see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0114/rg/index.html). He is a member of the European Science Foundation project "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective", the European Science Foundation network "INFTY" on set theory, the German Research Fund (DFG) International Network "Philosophy of Mathematics: Sociological Aspects and Mathematical Practice", and of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Project on "Foundations of Logical Consequence". Hannes is also a member of the European Science Foundation Eurocores Review Panel, a member of the Selection and Review Panel for the ESF Eurocores Scheme LogICCC, and a member of the European Science Foundation Pool of Reviewers.

At present, Hannes is writing a monograph, provisionally titled Speaking from Experience, in which he tries to resurrect Carnap's Logical Structure of the World. He was based in Duesseldorf from February 2009 until July 2009, where he was a Visiting Professor funded by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Awards

In October 2007 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize (£70,000) by the Leverhulme Trust. In November 2007 he received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (€45,000) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In February 2010 the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation announced that Hannes will be awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (€3,500,000). He was the University of Bristol candidate for the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award Competition and one of the finalists of the Goedel Centenary Young Scholars Competition that was organised by the Kurt Goedel Society and the John Templeton Foundation.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:

  • 2010: "On the Ramsey Test Without Triviality", to appear in the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.
  • 2010: "Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics", to appear in A. Gupta and J. van Benthem (eds.), Logic and Philosophy Today, special issue of the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 20 pages.
  • 2010: "Abstraction Grounded. A Note on Abstraction and Truth", to appear in: P. Ebert and M. Rossberg (eds.),  Abstractionism in Mathematics: Status Belli, 17 pages.
  • 2010: "New Life for Carnap's Aufbau?", to appear in Synthese, 47 pages.
  • 2010: "Logic in General Philosophy of Science: Old Things and New Things", to appear in Synthese, and also in V. Hendricks et al. (eds.), PHIBOOK, Yearbook of Philosophical Logic, Automatic Press, 14 pages.
  • 2010: "Mechanizing Induction" (with R. Ortner), to appear in: D. Gabbay, S. Hartmann, and J. Woods (eds.), Handbook for the History of Logic, Vol. 10: Inductive Logic, Berlin: Springer, 54 pages.
  • 2010: "Sleeping Beauty and Eternal Recurrence'', Analysis 70/2 (2010), 203-205.
  • 2010: "Mengers Logik fuer Ethik und Moral" (Menger's Logic for Ethics and Morality) (with A. Siegetsleitner), in: A. Siegetsleitner (ed.), Logischer Empirismus, Werte und Moral.
  • 2010: "An Objective Justification of Bayesianism II: The Consequences of Minimizing Inaccuracy" (with R. Pettigrew), Philosophy of Science 77/2, 236-272.
  • 2010: "An Objective Justification of Bayesianism I: Measuring Inaccuracy" (with R. Pettigrew), Philosophy of Science 77/2, 201-235.
  • 2009: Review of R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, Topoi 28/2 (2009), 163-165.
  • 2009: "On Formal and Informal Provability", in: O. Linnebo and O. Bueno (eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Mathematics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 263-299.
  • 2009: "How Abstraction Works" (with L. Horsten), in: A. Hieke and H. Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences, Ontos Press, 217-226.
  • 2009: Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences (edited, with A. Hieke), Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Press, 414 pp.
  • 2009: Reduction: Between the Mind and the Brain (edited, with A. Hieke), Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Press, 216 pp.
  • 2008: Review of: N. Unwin, Aiming at Truth, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, in: Philosophical Books 49/4, Basil Blackwell Publishing, 384-386.
  • 2008: "Criteria of Identity and Structuralist Ontology" (with J. Ladyman), Philosophia Mathematica 16/3, 388-396.
  • 2008: "On the Probabilistic Convention T", Review of Symbolic Logic 1/2, 218-224.
  • 2008: "Finitistic and Frequentistic Approximation of Probability Measures with or without sigma-Additivity" (with G. Schurz), Studia Logica 89/2, 257-283.
  • 2008: "An Impossibility Result on Semantic Resemblance", dialectica 62/3, 293-306.
  • 2008: Special issue of Studia Logica on "Psychologism in Logic" (ed.), Studia Logica 88/1.
  • 2008: "Towards a Logic of Type-Free Modality and Truth", in: C. Dimitracopoulos et al. (eds.), Logic Colloquium 05, Lecture Notes in Logic, Cambridge University Press, 68-84.
  • 2007: Philosophy of Mathematics: 5 Questions (ed., with V. Hendricks), Automatic Press, 342 pp. See: <http://www.phil-math.org/>
  • 2007: "Neural Network Models of Conditionals: An Introduction", in: X. Arrazola and J. M. Larrazabal et al. (eds.), LogKCA-07, Proceedings of the First ILCLI International Workshop on Logic and Philosophy of Knowledge, Communication and Action, Bilbao: University of the Basque Country Press, 191-223.
  • 2007: "On the Metatheory of Field's 'Solving the Paradoxes, Escaping Revenge'", in: JC Beall (ed.), The Revenge of the Liar. New Essays on the Paradox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 159-183.
  • 2007: "Dynamic Doxastic Logic: Why, Whether, How" (with K. Segerberg), Synthese KRA 155/2, 167-190.
  • 2007: "Beliefs in Conditionals vs. Conditional Beliefs", Topoi 26/1, 115-132.
  • 2007: "What Theories of Truth Should Be Like (But Cannot Be)", Blackwell Philosophy Compass 2/2, 276-290.
  • 2007: "A New Analysis of Quasianalysis", Journal of Philosophical Logic 36/2, 181-226.
  • 2007: Review of: V.F. Hendricks and J. Symons, Formal Philosophy, Automatic Press, 2005, in: Philosophy in Review 27/4 (2007), 266-268.
  • 2007: Review of: E. Koehler et al. (eds.), Kurt Goedel. Wahrheit & Beweisbarkeit, vol. I and II, Vienna: oebv et hpt, 2002, in: Philosophia Mathematica 15/2, 245?257.
  • 2006: "When Betting Odds and Credences Come Apart: More Worries for Dutch Book Arguments" (with D. Bradley), Analysis 66.2, 119-127. The article will be reprinted in: A. Eagle (ed.), Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings, Routledge, 2009.
  • 2005: "Paradox by (Non-Wellfounded) Definition", Analysis 65.4, 275-278.
  • 2005: "Reseaux de neurones capables des raisonner", Dossier Pour la Science (October/December special issue of the French edition of Scientific American), 97-101.
  • 2005: "What Truth Depends On", Journal of Philosophical Logic 34, 155-192.
  • 2005: "Interpreted Dynamical Systems and Qualitative Laws: From Inhibition Networks to Evolutionary Systems", Synthese 146, 189-202.
  • 2005: "Hodges' Theorem Does Not Account for Determinacy of Translation. A Reply to Werning", Erkenntnis 62, 411-425.

 

Email: Hannes.Leitgeb 'at' bristol.ac.uk

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