TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: MCMP – Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language

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18 episodes
2013 to 2015

Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists.
The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws.
Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

➤ mathematical philosophy methods • formal logic, conditionals, modality • truth relativism, superassertibility, intuitionism • semantics: quotation, compositionality, opacity • realism/structuralism, inter-theory relations • ontology: abstract objects, nonexistence, dependence • model theory, skepticism • God’s existence arguments • metaphysics of laws, measurement, disease classification

This podcast features research talks and public discussions from the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, focusing on how logical, mathematical, and formally explicit methods can be used to address traditional philosophical problems. Across the episodes, speakers examine core issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of language with close attention to how choices of logic, semantics, and formal modeling shape philosophical conclusions.

A recurring theme is the relationship between logic and ontology: whether standard logical principles carry hidden commitments about what exists, how quantification works, and what kinds of entities (such as abstract objects, structures, or “non-existent” items) our theories require. Related discussions explore modality and laws of nature—how to understand possibility and necessity, whether modal truths can be grounded in dispositions, and how to interpret foundational physical principles such as the principle of least action.

The podcast also places substantial emphasis on meaning and inference in natural language. Several talks address compositionality, intensionality and opacity, quotation, and the semantics of conditionals, connecting linguistic data and semantic theory to questions about valid reasoning (including challenges to modus ponens and modus tollens). Another cluster of episodes engages with realism debates in science and mathematics, including structural realism, inter-theoretical relations, measurement, and the dependence relations posited by mathematical structuralism.

Alongside these technical topics, the podcast includes philosophically structured debate about the rational assessability of theism, drawing on cosmological and teleological arguments as well as classic objections such as the problem of evil. Overall, the content is academically oriented and typically presented as colloquium or workshop lectures.

Episodes: