Name Matthias Schirn | ||
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Matthias Schirn (born 03.10.1944 in Weidenau/Siegen) is a German philosopher and logician.
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Education and academic career
Schirn completed his doctoral degree at the University of Freiburg in 1974 with a thesis on identity and synonymy in logic and semantics and subsequently taught at University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and Michigan State University. Schirn’s research during this time focused on theories of meaning and intensional semantics. He continued working in this area at the University of California at Berkeley, St. John’s College (Oxford), Harvard University and at Wolfson College (Oxford). In 1985, Schirn was awarded his habilitation at the University of Regensburg. Since 1987 he has held a distinguished Fiebiger-Professorship at the University of Munich (LMU) and since 2012 he has been a member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He has also taught at the University of Minnesota (1989), the State University of Campinas (1991), the Catholic University of São Paulo (1998), the National University of Buenos Aires (1992), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1993, 1994, 1997), the National University San Marcos in Lima (2009) and numerous other universities in Europe and Latin America. Schirn has published in Mind, The Philosophical Quarterly, The Philosophical Review, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Axiomathes, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Reports on Mathematical Logic, History and Philosophy of Logic, Logique et Analyse, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Metascience, Dialectica, Grazer Philosophische Studien, Kantstudien, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Theoria, Crítica, Manuscrito and other international journals. He has given invited lectures at the most prestigious universities in Europe, Asia, Latin America and South Africa as well as at some of the most distinguished universities in the United States of America and Australia. In 2014, he delivered a series of lectures on Frege’s philosophy of mathematics at the University of Oxford and carried out related research at Wolfson College. In the same year, he was invited to work as a research professor at Kyoto University and received a research fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
Research
Schirn has made contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology and is best known for his work on Frege’s logic and philosophy of mathematics as well as on Hilbert’s metamathematics and related issues in the history and philosophy of logic and the foundations of mathematics. Concerning Frege’s philosophy of mathematics, Schirn has more recently focused and published on the introduction of logical objects by means of second-order abstraction principles, their logical, semantic and epistemological nature, the problem of referential indeterminacy of abstract singular terms to which those principles give rise in a Fregean context, the foundations of real analysis and of geometry and last but not least on some aspects of neo-logicism. In a series of articles co-authored by Karl-Georg Niebergall, Niebergall and Schirn presented Hilbert’s finitist proof-theoretic approach in a new light by paying close attention to the development of his metamathematical work in the period 1922-1939 and by using the logical resources of modern proof theory. One important result of their published work is that Peano Arithmetic proves its own consistency indirectly in one step and that recursively enumerable extensions of QF-IA (QF = quantifier free — IA = induction axiom) likewise prove their own consistency indirectly in one step. Schirn and Niebergall are also known for their analysis of Hilbert’s extensions of the finitist point of view in the light of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and their attempted refutation of W. W. Tait’s widely accepted thesis that all finitist reasoning is primitive recursive (W.W. Tait, ‘Finitism’, Journal of Philosophy 78, 524-46).