Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf (; born 26 March 1931)
is a French-born American philosopher working in the field of the
philosophy of mathematics who taught at
Princeton University his entire career, from 1960 until his retirement in 2007. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and retired as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy.
Life and career
Benacerraf was born in
Paris to
Moroccan Jewish
Moroccan Jews ( ar, اليهود المغاربة, al-Yahūd al-Maghāriba he, יהודים מרוקאים, Yehudim Maroka'im) are Jews who live in or are from Morocco. Moroccan Jews constitute an ancient community dating to Roman times. Jews ...
parents. In 1939 the family moved to
Caracas and then to New York City.
When the family returned to Caracas, Benacerraf remained in the United States, boarding at the
Peddie School in
Hightstown, New Jersey. He attended
Princeton University for both his undergraduate and graduate studies.
He was elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.
His brother was the Venezuelan
Nobel Prize-winning immunologist
Baruj Benacerraf
Baruj Benacerraf (; October 29, 1920 – August 2, 2011) was 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 s ...
.
Philosophical work
Benacerraf is perhaps best known for his two papers "What Numbers Could Not Be" (1965) and "Mathematical Truth" (1973), and for his anthology on the philosophy of mathematics, co-edited with
Hilary Putnam.
In "What Numbers Could Not Be" (1965), Benacerraf 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. In particular, this argument is based on the point that
Ernst Zermelo
Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo (, ; 27 July 187121 May 1953) was a German logician and mathematician, whose work has major implications for the foundations of mathematics. He is known for his role in developing Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic ...
and
John von Neumann give distinct, and completely adequate, identifications of natural numbers with sets (see
Zermelo ordinals
In mathematics, the natural numbers are those numbers used for counting (as in "there are ''six'' coins on the table") and ordering (as in "this is the ''third'' largest city in the country").
Numbers used for counting are called ''cardinal ...
and
von Neumann ordinals). This argument is called
Benacerraf's identification problem
In the philosophy of mathematics, Benacerraf's identification problem is a philosophical argument developed by Paul Benacerraf against set-theoretic Platonism and published in 1965 in an article entitled "What Numbers Could Not Be".Paul Benacerraf ...
.
In "Mathematical Truth" (1973), he argues that no interpretation of mathematics 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 simultaneously (this argument is called Benacerraf's epistemological problem). 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 epistemologically inaccessible because they are causally 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.
Sexual harassment allegation
Elisabeth Lloyd has alleged that while she was a PhD student at Princeton, Benacerraf "petted and touched" her every day. She said, "It was just an extra price I had to pay, that the men did not have to pay, in order to get my Ph.D."
Benacerraf has denied the allegations, stating in an email to ''The Chronicle'' that he was "genuinely puzzled" by the accusations and does not know what prompted them. "I am not the sort of person that she describes in her interview", he said. "Yet I do not doubt her sincerity or the depth of the feelings that she reports", he added.
Publications
*Benacerraf, Paul (1960) ''Logicism, Some Considerations'', Princeton, Ph.D. Dissertation, University Microfilms.
*———— (1965) "What Numbers Could Not Be", ''The Philosophical Review'', 74:47–73.
*———— (1967
"God, the Devil, and Gödel" ''The Monist'', 51: 9–33.
*———— (1973) "Mathematical Truth", ''The Journal of Philosophy'', 70: 661–679.
*———— (1981) "Frege: The Last Logicist", ''The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy'', ''Midwest Studies in Philosophy'', 6: 17–35.
*———— (1985) "Skolem and the Skeptic", ''Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society'', Supplementary Volume 56: 85–115.
*———— and Putnam, Hilary (eds.) (1983) ''Philosophy of Mathematics : Selected Readings'' 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.
*———— (1996) "Recantation or Any old ω-sequence would do after all", ''Philosophia Mathematica'', 4: 184–189.
*———— (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.
*———— (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.
See also
*
American philosophy
*
List of American philosophers
References
Further reading
Books about Benacerraf
* Zimmermann, Manfred (1995
''Wahrheit und Wissen in der Mathematik. Das Benacerrafsche Dilemma'' 1. Auflage, Transparent Verlag, Berlin.
* Gupta, Anoop K. (2002
''Benacerraf's Dilemma and Natural Realism for Mathematics''. Ph.D. Dissertation, Ottawa University
Papers about Benacerraf
* Hilton, P
"What 'What Numbers Could Not Be', by Paul Benacerraf', is."*
*
*
Lucas, J. R. (1968
"Satan stultified: a rejoinder to Paul Benacerraf" The Monist, vol.52, No.1, pp. 145–158.
Articles on Benacerraf
"Benacerraf Interview"by The Dualist and the Stanford Philosophy Department
by Caroline Moseley
External links
Paul Benacerraf's homepage at PrincetonThe Benacerraf epistemological problem ''
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Benacerraf, Paul
1931 births
American Mizrahi Jews
20th-century Sephardi Jews
21st-century Sephardi Jews
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American philosophers
American people of Moroccan-Jewish descent
American logicians
Analytic philosophers
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jewish philosophers
Living people
Mathematical logicians
Metaphysicians
French expatriates in Venezuela
Peddie School alumni
Philosophers of mathematics
Princeton University faculty
Structuralism (philosophy of mathematics)
Writers from Paris
American metaphysics writers
French male writers
French emigrants to the United States