NEIL TENNANT

Humanities Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

tennant[dot]9[at]osu[dot]edu

Currently in the works:

• a comprehensive book on logic, commissioned by Oxford University Press, titled Logic: Philosophical, Mathematical and Computational Aspects.
• a monograph on rational belief-revision. It criticizes the main approaches developed thus far (most notably, AGM-theory) and offers an alternative, computationally implementable, theory that pays proper attention to the justificatory pedigrees of beliefs.

Ongoing research and planned papers include

• a natural-deduction foundation for 2-D and 3-D synthetic projective geometry
• a full development of my account of constructive logicism, dealing with addition and multiplication on the natural numbers
• an investigation, in full Fregean rigor, of the development of classical extensional mereology from Tarski's elegant axiomatization, with special attention to how best to make fully rigorous the proof by David Lewis, in Parts of Classes, of his Second Thesis.
• a formal semantics of truthmakers, which can do the work of Tarskian model-theoretic semantics for first-order languages, and which can help elucidate a much tighter homology between rules of semantic evaluation and deductive rules of inference
• a rigorous study of inductive definitions and proof by mathematical induction, and the role these methods play in the foundations of mathematics