W. D.  HART

Department of Philosophy, M/C 267
1400 University Hall
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL 60607-7114

tel: (312) 413-1278
fax: (312) 413-2093
e-mail
Curriculum Vitae

 

W. D. Hart is Professor of Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. His primary interests are logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology. His book The Engines of the Soul (Cambridge, 1988) is an argument for dualism as a solution to the mind–body problem. In "Long Decimals" he notes that Descartes assumed there is a one-to-one order-preserving correspondence between the reals and the points on a line, and he asks how space would differ, and how we might tell, should the reals include Robinson's infinitesimals. In "Skolem Redux" he argues that efforts by Boolos and others to revive Frege's reduction of number theory to second order logic confront a second order version of Skolem's paradox. In "The Illusion of a Future" he considers the inevitability of foolishness: we are bound to die, and to fear it, and what do you do when you can't escape or conquer what scares you? In "Invincible Ignorance" he argues that Fitch's Paradox is not a paradox but a proof that there are truths that cannot possibly be known, as any thoroughgoing realist would expect. In "Hyperheaps" he shows there are n+1 grains in the least heap in n-dimensional space, thus extending his solution to the paradox of the heap in "Hat-tricks and Heaps." He is writing a critical history of the relations between logic and philosophy over the last 130 years. Professor Hart has taught at the University of Michigan, University College London, and the University of New Mexico, and he has visited at City College of New York and the University of Pennsylvania.