Fall 2017  |  PHIL 8220 Section 001: Seminar: Philosophy of Mathematics (33521)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/05/2017 - 12/13/2017
Thu 04:00PM - 06:30PM
UMTC, West Bank
Walter W Heller Hall 731
Course Catalog Description:
Topics such as significance of limitative metatheorems (Goedel, et al), assessment of major foundational programs (set theoretic, modern Hilbertian, constructivist), modal/structuralist alternatives to standard platonism. prereq: 5202 or [4xxx or 5xxx] math course or instr consent
Class Description:


This course is structured around an about-to-appear book from Oxford University Press, by Stewart Shapiro and myself, entitled "Varieties of Continua: from Regions to Points and Back". The book develops several new axiom systems, with theorems and proofs of results on recovering the now standard point-based classical continua going back to Dedekind and Cantor on the non-punctiform basis of regions of a space and key relations on them. Surprisingly, despite the fact that the broad outline of such a program was presented by Alfred North Whitehead early in the 20th Century, only very recently has it been carried out in detail (where the devil resides!). As we will see early on in the course, even Alfred Tarski's ingenious efforts fell quite short of fulfilling the program. The original approach taken in our book - using mereology (theory of parts and wholes, a key tool in Tarski's efforts) along with 2d-order logic (equivalently, a logic of plural quantifiers or a weak set theory) - achieves full-scale reductions of point-based to regions-based classical continua (Rn), and we show how to recover metrical structure of n-dimensional Euclidean and some non-Euclidean geometries, as well. Surprisingly, our axioms - very elementary in character - suffice to derive regions-based versions of the Archimedean properties of these spaces and even the full axiom of Dedekind continuity (least upper bound principle), resulting in streamlined, unified systems. As we also demonstrate, however, our regions based concepts are definable in the classical punctiform systems, and our axioms derivable as theorems on translation, demonstrating the full mathematical equivalence of the two approaches.


Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/33521/1179
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
3 July 2017

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