Penelope Maddy

Penelope Maddy is an American philosopher, born on 4 July 1950, who is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Logic and Philosophy of Science and of Mathematics at the University of California, Irvine. She is best known for her work in the philosophy of mathematics, where she has developed and later revised positions on mathematical realism, especially set-theoretic realism, and on mathematical naturalism. She became interested in mathematics in her first algebra class in middle school, studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1972, and took a doctorate in philosophy at Princeton University in 1979 with a dissertation titled Set Theoretical Realism, supervised by John P. Burgess. Her early work defended a version of Kurt Gödel's view that mathematics describes a mind-independent realm, while arguing that some sets are concrete. In the 1990s she moved to the naturalism of her book Naturalism in Mathematics, which treats mathematics as answerable to its own standards rather than to those of natural science, and she has since studied how set theorists decide on new axioms beyond ZFC. Her honours include the 2002 Lakatos Award for Naturalism in Mathematics, a Gauss Lectureship of the German Mathematical Society in 2006 and the presidency of the Association for Symbolic Logic from 2007 to 2009.