Sean Ebels Duggan

Presently my main research is in the philosophy of logic, though I have wider interests in a number of topics.  My interest in philosophy of logic stems from the conviction that many epistemological questions can be resolved by a clearer understanding of the nature of logic and its role in shaping and governing belief.  This is reflected in my dissertation, which investigates the link between the ground of logical truth and the status of logic as providing norms for belief.  One way of thinking about logical norms (put roughly) is that we are criticizable for transgressing logical norms for belief regardless of what the world is like.  This tends to favor a view of logical truth that locates its ground in necessary features of thought (though not in a psychologistic sense) or representation.  I look at the development of this view, or something like it, in Kant's theoretical philosophy and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and how "necessary features of thought or representation" must be understood if the view is to succeed. An abstract of the dissertation is available here.

Though my most recent efforts were consumed by my dissertation, I have a number of research interests in logic and philosophy of mathematics. In the philosophy of mathematics I am primarily concerned with the nature of mathematical truth and knowledge. One point of entry into these issues is questions about the determinacy or indeterminacy of reference to the structure known as "The natural numbers."

I'm interested in formal logic generally, but particularly in questions of higher set theory, metamathematical questions of the proof theory of arithmetic, and questions about the nature of quantifiers. I hope to pay more attention to these questions later on down the road.

In addition to these, I am interested in a broad range of philosophical questions, in the history of early analytic philosophy (and more broadly the history of philosophy, analytic, continental, and otherwise, in the period from about 1860-1930), "naturalism" in philosophical method and its opponents, the nature of belief and its relation to content, epistemology generally as well as the epistemology of religious belief, and the development of philosophy of language, logic, mathematics, and science in the early modern period through Kant.

You can take a look a my CV here.