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Jody Azzouni | |
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| Born | Jawad Azzouni 1954 (age 69–70) |
| Occupation(s) | poet, writer and professor of philosophy |
Jody Azzouni (born Jawad Azzouni, 1954) is an American philosopher, poet, and writer. He currently is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University.
He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from New York University and his PhD from the City University of New York.
Azzouni is currently working on the philosophy of mathematics (he holds a degree in mathematics), science, logic, language and in areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. He acknowledges a debt to Willard Van Orman Quine. Azzouni is of the nominalist school of thought and has centered much of his philosophical efforts around defending nominalism.
Azzouni has published two collections of poetry with The Poets Press.
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In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universals – things that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects – objects that do not exist in space and time.
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Ian MacDougall Hacking was a Canadian philosopher specializing in the philosophy of science. Throughout his career, he won numerous awards, such as the Killam Prize for the Humanities and the Balzan Prize, and was a member of many prestigious groups, including the Order of Canada, the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy.
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Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
Timothy Williamson is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He is the former Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of New College, Oxford.
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John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.
Philosophy is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions.
A mathematical object is an abstract concept arising in mathematics. Typically, a mathematical object can be a value that can be assigned to a symbol, and therefore can be involved in formulas. Commonly encountered mathematical objects include numbers, expressions, shapes, functions, and sets. Mathematical objects can be very complex; for example, theorems, proofs, and even theories are considered as mathematical objects in proof theory.
Structuralism is a theory in the philosophy of mathematics that holds that mathematical theories describe structures of mathematical objects. Mathematical objects are exhaustively defined by their place in such structures. Consequently, structuralism maintains that mathematical objects do not possess any intrinsic properties but are defined by their external relations in a system. For instance, structuralism holds that the number 1 is exhaustively defined by being the successor of 0 in the structure of the theory of natural numbers. By generalization of this example, any natural number is defined by its respective place in that theory. Other examples of mathematical objects might include lines and planes in geometry, or elements and operations in abstract algebra.
Gideon Rosen is an American philosopher. He is a Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, and ethics.
Mathematicism is 'the effort to employ the formal structure and rigorous method of mathematics as a model for the conduct of philosophy', or the epistemological view that reality is fundamentally mathematical. The term has been applied to a number of philosophers, including Pythagoras and René Descartes although the term was not used by themselves.
The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is an argument in the philosophy of mathematics for the existence of abstract mathematical objects such as numbers and sets, a position known as mathematical platonism. It was named after the philosophers Willard Quine and Hilary Putnam, and is one of the most important arguments in the philosophy of mathematics.
