Warren Goldfarb

Warren Goldfarb

Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic
On leave Fall 2023
warren goldfarb

Research Interests: Mathematical Logic, Development of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, and Metaphysics

Warren Goldfarb, W. B. Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic, received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard and has been on the faculty since 1975. His teaching and research interests center on mathematical logic, on the development of analytic philosophy, particularly Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, and Wittgenstein (early and late), and on the interrelationships of logic and philosophy and the issues in metaphysics and philosophical logic that are at the heart of the analytic tradition.

He edited Jacques Herbrand's Logical Writings (1971), co-authored (with Burton Dreben) The Decision Problem: Solvable Classes of Quantificational Formulas (1979), and co-edited Kurt Gödel's Collected Works, vol. III (1995), vols. IV-V (2003). His textbook, Deductive Logic, was published in 2003.

Among his principal papers are "Logic in the Twenties: the Nature of the Quantifier" (1979), "The Undecidability of the Gödel Class with Identity" (1984); "Poincare Against the Logicists" (1987), "Russell's Reasons for Ramification" (1988), and "Frege's Conception of Logic" (2001); "I Want You to Bring Me a Slab: Remarks on the Opening Sections of the Philosophical Investigations" (1983), "Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules" (1985), "Wittgenstein on Understanding" (1992), and "Wittgenstein on Fixity of Meaning" (1997). Recent work includes “On Gödel's Way In: the Influence of Rudolf Carnap” (2005), “Das Überwinden: Non-realist Readings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus” (2011), “Rule-Following Revisited” (2013), “On Dummett's ‘Proof-Theoretic Justification of Logical Laws’” (2015), and “Wittgenstein against Logicism” (2018).

Contact Information

Emerson 301