Warren David Goldfarb (born 1949) is Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
. He specializes in the history of
analytic philosophy and in logic, most notably the classical
decision problem
In computability theory and computational complexity theory, a decision problem is a computational problem that can be posed as a yes–no question of the input values. An example of a decision problem is deciding by means of an algorithm wheth ...
.
Education and career
He received his A.B. and
philosophy Ph.D. from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
under the supervision of
Burton Dreben, and has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1975. He received
tenure
Tenure is a category of academic appointment existing in some countries. A tenured post is an indefinite academic appointment that can be terminated only for cause or under extraordinary circumstances, such as financial exigency or program disco ...
in 1982, the only philosopher to be promoted to tenure at Harvard between 1962 and 1999.
Prof. Goldfarb is also one of the founders of the
Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus and was one of the first openly gay Harvard faculty members.
Philosophical work
Goldfarb was an editor of volumes III–V of
Kurt Gödel's ''Collected Works''. He has also published articles on important analytic philosophers, including
Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...
,
Russell,
Wittgenstein's early and later work,
Carnap
Rudolf Carnap (; ; 18 May 1891 – 14 September 1970) was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. ...
and
Quine.
["The Goldfarb Panel," Warren Goldfarb on Quine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_tSuKAOGSY]
Selected publications
Books
*''The Decision Problem: Solvable Classes of Quantificational Formulas'', Addison-Wesley, 1979. (with
Burton Dreben).
*''Deductive Logic'', Hackett, 2003.
Articles
*"Logic in the Twenties: the Nature of the Quantifier," ''The Journal of Symbolic Logic'' (1979)
*"I want you to bring me a slab: Remarks on the opening sections of the ''Philosophical Investigations,''" ''Synthese'' (1983)
*"Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules," ''The Journal of Philosophy'' (1985)
*"Poincare Against the Logicists," in ''History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics'' (University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
*"Wittgenstein on Understanding," ''Midwest Studies in Philosophy'' (1992)
*"Frege's Conception of Logic," in ''Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in the 20th Century,'' Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh, editors (Oxford University Press, 2001)
*“Rule-Following Revisited," in ''Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind,'' Jonathan Ellis and Daniel Guevara, editors (Oxford University Press, 2012).
*
References
External links
Goldfarb's web page at Harvard University* Works by Warren Goldfarb a
PhilPapers
Living people
American logicians
Mathematical logicians
American historians of mathematics
Harvard College alumni
Harvard University faculty
Harvard University Department of Philosophy faculty
American gay men
1949 births
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
20th-century American LGBT people
21st-century American LGBT people
{{US-mathematician-stub