Jean Paul Van Bendegem | |
---|---|
Born | Ghent, Belgium | 28 March 1953
Nationality | Belgian |
Known for | Strict finitism, Philosophy of Mathematical Practice |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Vrije Universiteit Brussel |
Website | www |
Jean Paul Van Bendegem (born 28 March 1953 [1] in Ghent) [2] is a mathematician, a philosopher of science, and a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels.
Van Bendegem received his master's degree in mathematics in 1976. Afterwards, he went to study philosophy. He attended lectures on the philosophy of mathematics from Leo Apostel. He received his master's degree in philosophy in 1979.[ citation needed ]
Van Bendegem wrote his PhD thesis in philosophy on the subject of finitism under the supervision of Diderik Batens while at Ghent University. He defended his thesis in 1983. The content of the thesis was on notation systems, number theory, analysis, physics and logic in a finite empirical framework.
Van Bendegem was the dean of the faculty of Arts and philosophy, and was until his retirement in September 2018 head of the CLPS (Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science) at the same university.
He is an honorary chairman of SKEPP [3] (Research Society for Critical Evaluation of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal), an organisation that is prepared to pay 10,000 euros to anyone who can prove the validity of a paranormal claim.
Van Bendegem is the university's representative to the CNRL–NCNL [4] (French: Centre National de Recherches de Logique, Dutch: Nationaal Centrum voor Navorsingen in de Logica, English: National Centre for Investigations in Logic). He is chief editor of their quarterly magazine Logique et Analyse. [5]
In mathematics, he is a strict finitist. [6]
In the philosophy of mathematics, ultrafinitism is a form of finitism and intuitionism. There are various philosophies of mathematics that are called ultrafinitism. A major identifying property common among most of these philosophies is their objections to totality of number theoretic functions like exponentiation over natural numbers.
Finitism is a philosophy of mathematics that accepts the existence only of finite mathematical objects. It is best understood in comparison to the mainstream philosophy of mathematics where infinite mathematical objects are accepted as legitimate.
Ecolo, officially Écologistes Confédérés pour l'organisation de luttes originales is a French-speaking political party in Belgium based on green politics. The party is active in Wallonia, the Brussels-Capital Region, and the German-speaking Community of Belgium.
The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Dutch and English-speaking research university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has four campuses: Brussels Humanities, Science and Engineering Campus, Brussels Health Campus, Brussels Technology Campus and Brussels Photonics Campus.
Sal Restivo is a sociologist/anthropologist.
Graham Priest is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne, where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and also at the University of St Andrews.
Leo Apostel was a Belgian philosopher and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Apostel was an advocate of interdisciplinary research and the bridging of the gap between exact science and humanities.
Michel Van den Bergh is a Belgian mathematician and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and does research at Hasselt University. His research interest is on the fundamental relationship between algebra and geometry. In 2003, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Exact Sciences.
Diderik Batens, is a Belgian logician and epistemologist at the University of Ghent, faculty of Arts and Philosophy, department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences. Known chiefly for his work on adaptive and paraconsistent logics, his epistemological views may be broadly characterized as fallibilist.
The KK thesis or KK principle is a principle of epistemic logic which states that "If you know that P is the case then you know that you know that P is the case." This means that one cannot know that P is, if one does not know whether one's knowledge of P is correct. Its application in science can be expressed in the way that it must not only justify its knowledge claims but it must also justify its method of justifying. The principle is also described as knowledge-reflexivity contention.
Johan Braeckman is a Flemish philosopher. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Ghent and taught at various other institutions e.g. University of Amsterdam. He is editor of the skeptical organisation SKEPP's magazine Wonder en is gheen Wonder. His research, conducted along with a dozen doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, focuses on the philosophical problems associated with the life sciences, in particular the evolutionary theory and neuroscience.
SKEPP is an independent Belgian organization which promotes scientific skepticism. The organization’s name is a backronym for Studiekring voor de Kritische Evaluatie van Pseudowetenschap en het Paranormale.
Sander Griffioen is a Dutch philosopher, and Emeritus Professor for intercultural philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Matthias Schirn is a German philosopher and logician.
Tim Trachet is a Belgian writer, publicist, journalist and skeptic. He studied mathematics, astronomy and philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is a reporter at the VRT, where he produces history television documentaries.
Maarten Boudry is a Dutch-speaking Belgian philosopher and skeptic. He has been a researcher and teaching member of the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University since 2006. To date, he has published over 30 articles in various philosophy of science journals.
In philosophy, Weyl's tile argument, introduced by Hermann Weyl in 1949, is an argument against the notion that physical space is "discrete", as if composed of a number of finite sized units or tiles. The argument purports to show a distance function approximating Pythagoras' theorem on a discrete space cannot be defined and, since the Pythagorean theorem has been confirmed to be approximately true in nature, physical space is not discrete. Academic debate on the topic continues, with counterarguments proposed in the literature.
The following is a list of works by philosopher Graham Priest.
Antoon A.A. Van den Braembussche is a Flemish Philosopher of Culture, Emeritus Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a poet. He started as a poet, became a professor in the philosophy of history, and later specialized in art philosophy.
Sonja Smets is a Belgian and Dutch logician and epistemologist known for her work in belief revision and quantum logic. She is Professor of Logic and Epistemology at the University of Amsterdam, where she was the director of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (2016-2021) and is affiliated with both the Faculty of Science and the Department of Philosophy. She also holds a visiting professor position at the University of Bergen in Norway.
data sheet (b. 3-28-53)