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.
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