Philosophy 290-4

The foundational program known as “predicativity” took its start from the debate between Poincaré and Russell on the nature of logic and received already in 1918 an impressive formulation and systematization in Weyl’s The Continuum. By the 1950s the logical tools required for a logical analysis of the notion had been developed. In the last two decades reflection on predicativity has prospered not only from the foundational point of view but also from the philosophical point of view. Recent work by, among others, Parsons, Burgess, Wright, Dummett, Feferman, and Hellman has revived the discussion on predicativity and its connections to issues such as neologicism, indispensability arguments etc. In the seminar we will begin by looking at the classical positions by Poincaré and Weyl and after a brief interlude on the logical characterization of predicativity given by Feferman and Schütte in the sixties we will focus on some of the most recent philosophical discussions mentioned above.