Paul Benacerraf is an American philosopher of mathematics who has been teaching at Princeton University since he joined the faculty in 1960. He was Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, but then he has been named James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy there, and is now emeritus. Born in Paris, his parents were Sephardic Jews from Morocco. His brother is the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Baruj Benacerraf. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Princeton University is a coeducational private university located in Princeton, New Jersey in the United States of America. ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Location Coordinates Time Zone CET (GMT +1) Administration Country France Région ÃŽle-de-France Département Paris (75) Subdivisions 20 arrondissements Mayor Bertrand Delanoë  (PS) (since 2001) City Statistics Land... In the strictest sense, a Sephardi (ספרדי, Standard Hebrew Səfardi, Tiberian Hebrew Səp̄ardî; plural Sephardim: ספרדים, Standard Hebrew Səfardim, Tiberian Hebrew Səp̄ardîm) is a Jew original to the... Nobel Prize medal. ... Baruj Benacerraf, M.D. Baruj Benacerraf (born 29 October 1920) is a Venezuelan-American immunologist who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the Major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface molecules important for the immune systems distinction between self and non...

Benacerraf is perhaps best known for his two papers What Numbers Could Not Be (1965) and Mathematical Truth (1973), and for his highly successful anthology on the philosophy of mathematics, co-edited with Hilary Putnam.

In What Numbers Could Not Be, he argues against a Platonist view of mathematics, and for structuralism, on the ground that what is important about numbers is the abstract structures they represent rather than the objects that number words ostensibly refer to. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Structuralism is best known as a theory in the humanities. ...

In Mathematical Truth, he argues that no interpretation of mathematics (available at that time) offers a satisfactory package of epistemology and semantics; it is possible to explain mathematical truth in a way that is consistent with our syntactico-semantical treatment of truth in non-mathematical language, and it is possible to explain our knowledge of mathematics in terms consistent with a causal account of epistemology, but it is in general not possible to accomplish both of these objectives simulataneously. He argues for this on the grounds that an adequate account of truth in mathematics implies the existence of abstract mathematical objects, but that such objects are epistemolgically inaccessible because they are cuasally inert and beyond the reach of sense perception. On the other hand, an adequate epistemology of mathematics, say one that ties truth-conditions to proof in some way, precludes understanding how and why the truth-conditions have any bearing on truth.

Publications

Works

• Benacerraf, Paul (1960) Logicism, Some Considerations, Princeton, Ph.D. dissertation, University Microfilms.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1965) What Numbers Could Not Be, The Philosophical Review, 74:47-73.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1967) God, the Devil, and Gödel, The Monist, 5l: 9-33.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1973) Mathematical Truth, The Journal of Philosophy, 70: 661-679.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1981) Frege: The Last Logicist, The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, Midwest studies in Philosophy, 6: l7-35.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1985) Skolem and the Skeptic, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 56: 85-ll5.
• Benacerraf, Paul and Putnam, Hilary (eds.) (1983) Philosophy of Mathematics : Selected Readings 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1996) Recantation or Any old w-sequence would do after all, Philosophia Mathematica, 4: 184-189.
• Benacerraf Paul (1996) What Mathematical Truth Could Not Be - I, in Benacerraf and His Critics, A. Morton and S. P. Stich, eds., Blackwell's, Oxford and Cambridge, pp 9-59.
• Benacerraf, Paul (1999) What Mathematical Truth Could Not Be - II, in Sets and Proofs, S. B. Cooper and J. K. Truss, eds., Cambridge University Press, pp. 27-51.

Book about Benacerraf

• Wahrheit und Wissen in der Mathematik. Das Benacerrafsche Dilemma by Manfred Zimmermann

Papers about Benacerraf

• Benacerraf's Dilema Revisited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright
• Satan stultified: a rejoinder to Paul Benacerraf by J. R. Lucas

Writings on Benacerraf

• Benacerraf Interview by The Dualist and the Stanford Philosophy Department
• "Whatever I am now, it happened here" by Caroline Moseley

External links

• Paul Benacerraf's homepage at Princeton