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Lecture Series ``Collegium Logicum''
Kurt Goedel Society
University of Technology, Vienna, Austria


Lecture Announcement
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MICHAEL DETLEFSEN
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University of Notre Dame, Indiana


Constructive Existence Claims
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Monday, May 30, 1994, 16:45


A constant of the constructivist tradition in the philosophy of
mathematics is the requirement that existence claims be backed
by an ``exhibition'' of an object of the type claimed to exist.
Call this the *exhibition requirement*.

In this talk, we examine two different epistemological models
for this requirement.  One of these---that favored by the intuitionists
Brouwer and Weyl---conceives exhibition as essentially an act of
creation and sees its epistemic significance as residing in the
presumedly special access that a creator is supposed to have with
respect to her creations.  The other, which was advocated by Hilbert
and incorporated into his finitary standpoint, conceives of exhibition
as a kind of public display of an intersubjectively perceivable object.
We argue, contrary to Goedel, that, owing to the deep differences
separating these two different ways of understanding the exhibition
requirement, it is a mistake to (i) think of the exhibition requirement
as a single condition serving as a common ingredient of all forms of
constructivism, and (ii)~think of finitism as a mere restriction of
intuitionism which results from limiting the objects dealt with in
exhibition to spatio-temporal concretia.


PLACE:
Seminarraum SEM 181A, Institut fuer Informationssysteme,
Paniglgasse 16, 1. Stock, 1040 Wien.

MICHAEL DETLEFSEN is professor of philosophy at the University
of Notre Dame, Indiana.  He is editor of the prestigious
_Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic_.  He is best known for
his work on the finitistic conception of the foundations
of mathematics, and for his seminal book on _Hilbert's Program_.
He can be reached by email at: Detlefsen.1@nd.edu.

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Kurt-Goedel-Gesellschaft
Technische Universitaet Wien
Institut fuer Computersprachen E185.2
Resselgasse 3/1, A-1040 Wien

Tel: (+43 1) 588 01/4088
Fax: (+43 1) 504 15 89
email: kgs@logic.tuwien.ac.at

Mit Unterstuetzung des
Bundesministeriums fuer Wissenschaft und Forschung