Paul Benacerraf

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Paul Benacerraf is an American philosopher of mathematics who has been teaching at Princeton University 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.

1 Publications
2 External links

[edit] Publications

[edit] 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.
Benacerraf, Paul (1996) Recantation or Any old w-sequence would do after all, Philosophia Mathematica, 4: 184-189.
Benacerraf Paul (1996) What Mathematical Truth Could Not Be - I, in Benacerraf and His Critics, A. Morton and S. P. Stich, eds., Blackwell's, Oxford and Cambridge, pp 9-59.
Benacerraf, Paul (1999) What Mathematical Truth Could Not Be - II, in Sets and Proofs, S. B. Cooper and J. K. Truss, eds., Cambridge University Press, pp. 27-51.