This page
You have reached Curtis Franks's web-page at the
University of Notre Dame du Lac.
Its author
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.
His philosophy
I am interested in the origins of modern logic, and much of
my 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, 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' conceptions of logic and
explaining its relationship to their scientific innovations.
A splinter of my work is devoted to describing my 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.
You may read a
draft of an essay on Gerhard Gentzen that I am currently
writing.
|