News & Events
Dubrovnik Conference
Specific topics of the conferences vary but in recent years there has been a practice of alternating between a conference focused on problems in metaphysics and epistemology and one focused on issues in moral philosophy. The conference theme for 2009 is philosophy of mind, and the specific topic that many speakers will address is the Philosophical Significance of Attention.Foundational Adventures: Conference in Honor of Harvey M. Friedman
Harvey Friedman is the world's leading researcher in the Foundations of Mathematics. His work places him as the natural heir and successor to Kurt Goedel, whose famous Incompleteness Theorems transformed the world of logic and mathematics in the 1930s. Goedel's First Incompleteness Theorem showed that every consistent and sufficiently strong formal system of arithmetic fails to decide the so-called Goedel-sentence saying "I am unprovable". The Goedel-sentence says this via an ingenious and tortuous numerical coding of sentences and proofs. In the primitive notation for arithmetic, it is a very long and complicated sentence with no intuitive mathematical appeal. Friedman has continued the theme begun by Goedel by strengthening his results in two directions. First, Friedman considers much stronger systems than arithmetic---systems involving all of standard set theory plus so-called 'large cardinal' axioms. Secondly, he chooses short, simple, intuitively appealing combinatorial statements which he then shows to be undecided even by these very strong systems of set theory. His work poses a serious challenge to mathematics: how does one search for new axioms?Friedman's work covers not only these deep and baffling incompleteness phenomena, but also ranges widely over proof theory, recursion theory, model theory, set theory, intuitionism and the foundations of comptuer science. His work is interdisciplinary, combining technical depth and philosophical profundity in uncompromising pursuit of what he calls "g.i.i." (general intellectual importance). It began with his PhD at MIT at the age of 18, and continues today with a crescendo of creativity. This conference brings together an unparalleled list of stellar speakers, from Mathematics, Computing Science and Philosophy, to celebrate (as Patrick Suppes wryly wrote) "what Harvey has accomplished thus far in his career". It is a celebration of the importance of current and future work in the field of foundations, and the decades-long contribution of one who has dedicated himself to the life of the mind.
