this page
You have reached
Curtis Franks' web-page at the
University of Notre Dame du Lac. The page was created by copying Aldo Antonelli's
page and editing it slightly.
me
I grew up in
Florence, Alabama, where my family still lives.
I studied mathematics and philosophy at
Rice University in Houston, and later at the University of California's
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science in Irvine.
These days I live in
South Bend, Indiana and work at Notre Dame,
where I teach and research
logic and other things in the Department of Philosophy.
philosophy
I am interested in the origins of the formal science of meta-theory,
and much of my research is devoted to this topic in one way or another.
Rather than get involved in traditional philosophical debate about
which metaphysical and epistemological assumptions are the true ones,
I prefer just to understand the conceptual problems, methodological
scruples, and tendancies of thought that motivated logicians like
Hilbert, Herbrand, Gödel, Gentzen, and Skolem, because I see the
beauty of the science they forged as evidence for the correctness of
their views. Thus most of my work is devoted to recovering the details
and oddities of such figures' philosophical thought and explaining its
relationship to their scientific innovations. I also work within the
meta-mathematical tradition, adapting ordinary methods to new settings
according to these philosophical interests. (A splinter of my work
is devoted to describing my somewhat pragmatic view about why this is
a good way to study logic philosophically. In this vein I have some
amateurish interest in the ideas of Peirce, Wittgenstein, Dreben, and
Rorty.)
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