About
These pages are by me, Peter Smith. I’m a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge.
I’ve been in Cambridge since 1998. I was previously in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield for ten years, and before that was at UCW Aberystwyth (where there was once a rather good department, closed as a result of the ‘Thatcher cuts’). In ancient history, I was at Trinity for eight years, where I took Part III Maths as an applied mathematician, Part II Moral Sciences (as philosophy was then called) for light relief, then stayed on trying to become a philosopher.
My philosophical curiosity used to range pretty widely. For twelve years until the end of 1999, I was editor of the philosophy journal Analysis, which was great fun but ludicrously time-consuming because I’m bad at delegating.
I also wrote (with my Aber colleague O.R. Jones) a once widely used textbook, The Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (CUP, 1986): it now looks a product of its time, but when I very occasionally dip into it, it still seems to have its moments!
More recently I wrote a philosophy of science book Explaining Chaos (CUP, 1998), which has some pretty maths, if you like that kind of thing, and deflates some over-excited philosophical comments about ‘chaos theory’. (I’d put some things a bit differently now, but the basic deflationary story still seems right to me.)
But now I find myself back where I started, interested in core logic and philosophy of maths, and increasingly rather sceptical about the rest. I’ve edited Vagueness: A Reader with Rosanna Keefe (MIT 1997), and written An Introduction to Formal Logic (CUP 2003, revised reprint 2009), and An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems (CUP 2007, fourth reprint with corrections/revisions 2009).
I’m currently starting work on a book on the consistency of arithmetic. Which is going very slowly …
Less seriously, I contribute frequently to the excellent Ask Philosophers site, and you’ll find me too on Facebook.