Mathematics and Necessity. - Essays in the History of Philosophy

The volume is edited by Timothy Smiley, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Jonathan Bennett has written extensively on early modern philosophy as well as on ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind and language, his most recent book being The Act Itself (1995). After a career spent mostly at the Universities of Cambridge, British Columbia, and Syracuse, he now lives in retirement on Bowen Island, British Columbia. He recently completed a two-volume work entitled Learning from Six Philosophers (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and hopes to complete a much shorter one on conditionals. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. M. F. Burnyeat is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford. He was for twelve years (1984-96) Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Cambridge University; before that, Lecturer in Philosophy at University College London for fourteen years, then Lecturer in Classics and Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1992. He is the author of The Theaetetus of Plato (1990) and of articles in both classical and philosophical journals. His contribution to this volume may be read as a sequel to his `Culture and Society in Plato's Republic', The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 20 (1999), 217-324, which deals with the elementary education in Plato's ideal city. Ian Hacking is University Professor in the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 1983. Previously he had taught at the Universities of British Columbia, Makerere, Cambridge, and Stanford. He has published a number of books on the foundations of statistics, the philosophy of language, the history of ideas of probability, and the philosophy of experimental science. His most recent books are Rewriting the Soul (1995), Mad Travelers (1998) and The Social Construction of What? (1999). He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.