Curtis Franks at the University of Notre Dame

 Site Index
 o teaching
 o writing
 o vitæ
 o Shabbos
 o contact
 o students


 Links
 o Philosophy Department
 o Math/Phil Joint PhD.
 o Midwest Workshop
 o Logic at Notre Dame

This site

You have reached Curtis Franks's web-pages at the University of Notre Dame du Lac.

Its author

Curtis Franks teaches logic and other things in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Previously he studied mathemtics and philosophy at Rice University in Houston, and later at the University of California's Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science in Irvine.

His philosophy

Franks is interested in the origins of modern logic, and much of his research is devoted to this topic in one way or another. Rather than get involved in traditional philosophical debates about the nature and meaning of logic and mathematics, he prefers just to understand the conceptual problems, methodological scruples, and tendencies of thought that motivated logicians like Hilbert, Herbrand, Gödel, Gentzen, and Skolem, because he sees the beauty of the science they forged as evidence for the correctness of their views. Thus most of his work is devoted to recovering the details and oddities of such figures' conceptions of logic and explaining its relationship to their scientific innovations. A splinter of his work is devoted to explaining his view that this is a good way to study logic philosophically. In this vein he has some interest in the ideas of Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Rorty.


Questions?

E-mail is reliable.

Last modified August 2010.