cookx432@umn.edu

819 Heller Hall
612-625-8379

My research focuses on two (sometime overlapping) themes. First, I am interested in paradoxes - primarily the semantic, set-theoretic, and soritical ones. In particular, I am interested in defending a certain sort of many-valued logic as a solution to the Liar paradox, and showing how this approach (based on the idea that concepts like 'language', 'statement', and even 'truth value' are indefinitely extensible) can solve the Revenge Problem. Second, I am interested in Fregean and so-called Neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics. Among other projects, I am currently involved in the first ever full English translation of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze. I am also in the early stages of preparing a book defending Frege's definition of the natural numbers as certain sorts of extensions (or sets).

Area Editor: Philosophy of Mathematics, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[Click here to see a list of desired articles]

Selected Publications

“Bad Company and Upper Hume”, Synthese, (special issue on the Bad Company Objection), [forthcoming].

“Embracing Revenge: On the Indefinite Extensibility of Language”, Revenge of the Liar [forthcoming], (J.C. Beall ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press.

“There Are Non-circular Paradoxes (But Yablos' Isn't One of Them)” The Monist 89, [2006].

“Knights, Knaves, and Unknowable Truths”, Analysis 66, [2006]: 10 - 16.

“Intuitionism Reconsidered”, The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic [2005], (S. Shapiro ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press: 387 – 411.

“Abstraction and Identity” (with Philip Ebert), Dialectica 59 (special issue on the Caesar Problem), [2005]: 121 – 139.

“What’s Wrong with Tonk(?)”, Journal of Philosophical Logic 34, [2005]: 217 – 226.

“Patterns of Paradox”, Journal of Symbolic Logic 69, [2004]: 767 – 774.

“Iteration One More Time”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 44, [2003]: 63 – 92, reprinted in The Arché Papers on the Mathematics of Abstraction, R. Cook (ed.), Springer, [forthcoming].

“Vagueness and Mathematical Precision”, Mind 111, [2002]: 227 – 247.