Im Rahmen des Forschungsseminars laden wir recht herzlich ein zum Vortrag:

Prof. Hannes Leitgeb (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy)
"Philosophy as a rational Reconstruction. A Methodological Proposal"

Abstract

What is the aim of philosophy? Does it differ fundamentally from science? Is there philosophical progress? How should we pursue philosophy in the future? I will suggest answers to these questions by developing a conception of philosophy as rational reconstruction (taking the term from Rudolf Carnap): 'Re-' means that something is given upon which philosophers reflect. '-construction' means that philosophers are taking apart whatever they are finding: studying, amending, and reassembling it. 'Rational' means that, when doing so, philosophers are taking a normative stance: they aim to make transparent, systematize, evaluate, correct, and improve whatever ought to be rational, for the rationality of which we can take responsibility, and the rationality of which we should investigate and advance. I will compare this conception of philosophy to some alternatives (conceptual analysis, naturalism), I will argue that it is preferable, and I will conclude with a proposal for how we might be able to improve our rational reconstructions in the future—a proposal which I am calling 'Mathematical Empiricism'.

Speaker

Hannes Leitgeb completed a PhD degree (1998) in mathematics and a PhD degree (2001) in philosophy, each at the University of Salzburg, where he later also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy. In 2003 he received an Erwin-Schrödinger Fellowship from the Austrian Research Fund on the basis of which he did research at the Department of Philosophy/CSLI at Stanford University in 2004-2005. In 2005 he took up a joint position as a Reader at the Departments of Philosophy and Mathematics in Bristol, and in 2007 he became Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics there. In 2010 he moved to LMU Munich, where he is now an Alexander von Humboldt Professor and holds the Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language, and where he co-directs the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (which he founded in 2010). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Erkenntnis.