Prof. DDr. Hannes Leitgeb

Head of Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language

Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language, MCMP

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Ludwigstr. 31

Room 226

80539 München

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Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1

80539 München

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Further Information

Hannes Leitgeb completed a Masters (1997) and a PhD degree (1998) in mathematics and a PhD degree (2001) in philosophy, each at the University of Salzburg, where he later also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy. In 2003 he received an Erwin-Schrödinger Fellowship from the Austrian Research Fund FWF on the basis of which he did research at the Department of Philosophy/CSLI at Stanford University. In 2005 he took up a joint position as a Reader at the Departments of Philosophy and Mathematics in Bristol. In 2007 he became Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics. In autumn 2010 he became Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language, Alexander von Humboldt Professor, and Head of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the LMU Munich.

Research Interests

Hannes Leitgeb's research interests are in logic (theories of truth and modality, paradox, conditionals, nonmonotonic reasoning, dynamic doxastic logic), epistemology (belief, inference, belief revision, foundations of probability, Bayesianism), philosophy of mathematics (structuralism, informal provability, abstraction, criteria of identity), philosophy of language (indeterminacy of translation, compositionality), cognitive science (symbolic representation and neural networks, metacognition), philosophy of science (empirical content, measurement theory), and history of philosophy (Logical Positivism, Carnap, Quine). He is very much in favour of Mathematical or Formal Philosophy, i.e., the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy.

Further Activities

Hannes Leitgeb has been Coordinating Editor of the Review of Symbolic Logic since 2013 and the Editor-in-Chief of Erkenntnis since 2011, he is an Associate Editor of Studia Logica, a Consulting Editor of Theoria, a Consulting Editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic, a Review Editor of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, a Subject Editor in Philosophy of Mathematics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a member of the Editorial Boards of the European Journal for the Philosophy of Science and of the Grazer Philosophical Studies, a member of the Editorial Board of PHIBOOK: The Yearbook of Philosophical Logic, an Editor of The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (Open Court), and an Editor of the LOGOS Book Series on Logic, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Language (Ontos Press). He has (co-)edited special issues of Synthese and Studia Logica. In 2006 he co-organised the European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on "Applied Logic in the Methodology of Science" in Bristol, and in 2008 he co-organised the 31st International Wittgenstein Symposium on "Reduction and Elimination" in Kirchberg as well as a workshop on "Formal Philosophy" at the ECAP 2008. In 2010 he co-organised a workshop on "Scientific Philosophy – Past and Future" at Tilburg, and in 2011 he organised workshops on Modality, Computational Metaphysics, Bayesian Methods in Philosophy, Carnap, as well as the 1st Bristol-Munich Workshop in Munich. In 2014 he co-organised a Summer School on "Proof, Truth, Computation" which was sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2015 he was the program chair of the 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (CLMPS) at Helsinki.

Hannes Leitgeb is the PI of a DFG (German Research Fund) project on "Syntactic Approaches to Interacting Modalities", Co-PI of a joint French-German ANR-DFG Project on "Mathematics: Objectivity by Representation“, and Co-PI of the EU Horizon MSCA Innovative Training Network "Diaphora: Philosophical Problems, Resilience and Persistent Disagreement". He was the Co-PI of a MINCYT-DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Project on Truth, Paradoxes and Modalities, together with Eduardo Barrio from the University of Buenos Aires. He was the PI of the Bristol Group of a EUROCORES research project on Metacognition which was funded by the European Science Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) from 2006 to 2009, and which also included teams in France, the US, Germany, and Austria (see http://mpscesf.free.fr/). He is one of the founding members of a Research Group on Logical Methods in Epistemology, Semantics, and Philosophy of Mathematics (the "Luxemburger Zirkel") which has been sponsored by the British Academy and the Bristol Institute for Advanced Studies (see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfop0114/rg/index.html). He was a member of the European Science Foundation project "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective", the European Science Foundation network "INFTY" on set theory, the German Research Fund (DFG) International Network "Philosophy of Mathematics: Sociological Aspects and Mathematical Practice", and of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Project on "Foundations of Logical Consequence". Hannes Leitgeb is also a member of the SH4 panel for the ERC Starting Grant 2016, the Executive Committee of the Association for Symbolic Logic (2015–2018), and the DFG Steering Committee for Philosophical Symposia} (since May 2015). He was a member of the European Science Foundation Eurocores Review Panel, a member of the Selection and Review Panel for the ESF Eurocores Scheme LogICCC, and a member of the European Science Foundation Pool of Reviewers.

Awards

In October 2007 Hannes Leitgeb was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize (£70,000) by the British Leverhulme Trust. In November 2007 he received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (€45,000) from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In February 2010 he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (€3,500,000) by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (see http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/ahp-2010-en.html, http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/movies/leitgeb_en.mp4). He was the University of Bristol candidate for the Leverhulme Research Leadership Award Competition and one of the finalists of the Goedel Centenary Young Scholars Competition that was organised by the Kurt Goedel Society and the John Templeton Foundation. In 2011 his article "An Objective Justification of Bayesianism II" (with R. Pettigrew) was selected for the Philosopher's Annual Vol. 30, and in 2015 his article "A Lottery Paradox for Counterfactuals Without Agglomeration" was selected for the Philosopher's Annual Vol. 34 (which are meant to include the 10 best papers in philosophy in 2010 and 2014, respectively, see http://www.philosophersannual.org). In 2012 and 2015 he received the Philosophy Students' Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of Religion at LMU Munich. In 2014 he became a member of the Academia Europaea and in 2016 a member of the Leopoldina (Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher).

Coursera MOOC: Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (with Stephan Hartmann)

Since antiquity, philosophers have questioned the foundations - the foundations of the physical world, of our everyday experience, of our scientific knowledge, and of culture and society. In recent years, more and more young philosophers have become convinced that, in order to understand these foundations, and thus to make progress in philosophy, the use of mathematical methods is of crucial importance. This is what our course will be concerned with: mathematical philosophy, that is, philosophy done with the help of mathematical methods.

As we will try to show, one can analyze philosophical concepts much more clearly in mathematical terms, one can derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions by mathematical proof, and one can build mathematical models in which we can study philosophical problems.

So, as Leibniz would have said: even in philosophy, calculemus. Let's calculate.

Forthcoming Publications

Many of my papers are available online at Academia.edu.

  • "A Structural Justification of Probabilism: From Partition Invariance to Subjective Probability'', to appear in Philosophy of Science, 19 pages.
  • ''On Non-Eliminative Structuralism. Unlabeled Graphs as a Case Study (Part B)'', to appear in Philosophia Mathematica, 31 pages.
  • ''On Non-Eliminative Structuralism. Unlabeled Graphs as a Case Study (Part A)'', to appear in Philosophia Mathematica, 39 pages.
  • ''Rudolf Carnap'' (with A. Carus), to appear in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • ''Why Pure Mathematical Truths Are Metaphysically Necessary: A Set-theoretic Explanation'', to appear in Synthese, 7 pages.
  • ''Stability and the Lottery Paradox'', to appear in a volume on the Lottery Paradox, edited by Igor Douven, Cambridge University Press.
  • ''On Potential Infinity in Arithmetic'' (with A. Hieke), to appear in a volume edited by N. Gratzl and S. Huttegger.

Recent Publications

View publications in LMU's Open Access

Publications in LMU's Open Access

Monograph

Journal article

Paper

Book Section

  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2018)
    Neural Network Models of Conditional
    In: Hansson, Sven Ove; Hendricks, Vincent F. (eds.): Introduction to Formal Philosophy. Springer Undergraduate Texts in Philosophy; Berlin: Springer. pp. 147-176
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2016)
    Abstraction Grounded. A Note on Abstraction and Truth
    In: Rossberg, Marcus; Ebert, Philip A. (eds.): Abstractionism ; essays in philosophy of mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 269-282
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2016)
    A Bridge Principle for Ranking Functions and Subjetive Probability
    In: Freitag, Wolfgang; Rott, Hans; Sturm, Holger; Zinke, Alexandra; Spohn, Wolfgang (eds.): Von Rang und Namen ; philosophical essays in honour of Wolfgang Spohn. Münster: Mentis. pp. 243-253
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2016)
    Probability in Logic
    In: Hájek, Alan; Hitchcock, Christopher (eds.): The Oxford handbook of probability and philosophy. Oxford handbooks in philosophy; Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 681-704
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2014)
    Belief as Qualitative Probability
    In: Crangle, C.E.; García de la Sienra, A.; Longino, E. (eds.): Foundations and methods from mathematics to neuroscience. CSLI lecture notes; Vol. 213. Stanford: CSLI Publications. pp. 405-417
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2014)
    Belief as a Simplification of Probability, and What This Entails
    In: Baltag, A.; Smets, S. (eds.): Johan van Benthem on Logical and Information Dynamics. Outstanding Contributions to Logic; Vol. 5. Cham [u.a.]: Springer International Publishing. pp. 405-417
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2013)
    The Stability Theory of Belief. A Summary
    In: Benthem, J. van; Liu, F. (eds.): Logic across the university ; foundations and applications ; proceedings of the Tsinghua Logic Conference, Beijing, 2013. Studies in logic; Vol. 47. London: College Publications. pp. 47-54
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2012)
    Metacognition and Indicative Conditionals: A Precis
    In: Beran, Michael; Brandl, Johannes; Perner, Josef; Proust, Joëlle (eds.): Foundations of Metacognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 252-266
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2012)
    From Type-Free Truth to Type-Free Probability
    In: Restall, Greg; Russell, Gillian (eds.): New Waves in Philosophical Logic. New Waves in Philosophy; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 84-94
  • Leitgeb, Hannes; Ortner, Ronald (2011)
    Mechanizing Induction
    In: Gabbay, D.; Hartmann, S.; Woods, J. (eds.): Inductive Logic. Handbook of the History of Logic; Vol. 10. Oxford: North Holland (Elsevier). pp. 719-772
  • Leitgeb, Hannes; Siegetsleitner, Anne (2010)
    Mengers Logik für Ethik und Moral. Nichts von Sollen, nichts von Güte, nichts von Sinnlosigkeit
    In: Siegetsleitner, Anne (eds.): Logischer Empirismus, Werte und Moral ; eine Neubewertung. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis; Vol. 15. Vienna/New York: Springer. pp. 197-218
  • Gratzl, Norbert (2009)
    Definite Descriptions: Language, Logic, and Elimination
    In: Hieke, Alexander; Leitgeb, Hannes (eds.): Reduction – Abstraction – Analysis Proceedings of the 31th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg 2008. Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. New Series.; Ontos Verlag. pp. 353-361
  • Anglberger, Albert (2009)
    Alternative Reductions for Dynamic Deontic Logics
    In: Leitgeb, Hannes; Hieke, Alexander (eds.): Reduction - Abstraction - Analysis. Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag. pp. 179-191
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2009)
    On Formal and Informal Provability
    In: Linnebo, O.; Bueno, O. (eds.): New Waves in Philosophy of Mathematics. New waves in philosophy; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 263-299
  • Leitgeb, Hannes; Horsten, Leon (2009)
    How Abstraction Works
    In: Hieke, A.; Leitgeb, H. Internationales Wittgenstein-Symposium (eds.): Reduction - Abstraction - Analysis. Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society : New series; Vol. 11. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos-Verlag. pp. 217-226
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2007)
    Towards a Logic of Type-Free Modality and Truth
    In: Dimitracopoulos, C. (eds.): Logic Colloquium 2005 : proceedings of the Annual European Summer Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, held in Athens, Greece, July 28-August 3, 2005. Lecture Notes in Logic; Vol. 28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 68-84
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2007)
    On the Metatheory of Field's 'Solving the Paradoxes, Escaping Revenge'
    In: Beall, J.C. (eds.): The revenge of the liar ; new essays on the paradox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 159-183
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2007)
    Neural Network Models of Conditionals: An Introduction
    In: Arrazola, X.; Larrazabal, J.M (eds.): LogKCA-07. Proceedings of the First ILCLI International Workshop on Logic and Philosophy of Knowledge, Communication and Action; Bilbao: University of the Basque Country Press. pp. 191-223
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2007)
    Struktur und Symbol
    In: Schmidinger, H.; Sedmak, C. (eds.): Der Mensch – ein "animal symbolicum"? Sprache, Dialog, Ritual. Topologien des Menschlichen; Vol. 4. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. pp. 131-147
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2006)
    Argument und Beweis
    In: Kreuzbauer, G.; Dorn, G. (eds.): Argumentation in Theorie und Praxis: Philosophie und Didaktik des Argumentierens. Wien: Lit-Verlag. pp. 31-39
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2005)
    How Similarities Compose
    In: Werning, M.; Machery, E.; Schurz, G. (eds.): The compositionality of meaning and content, Volume I, Foundational issues. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Verlag. pp. 147-167
  • Leitgeb, Hannes; Halbach, Volker; Welch, Philip (2005)
    Possible Worlds Semantics for Predicates
    In: Kahle, R. Association for Symbolic Logic (eds.): Intensionality. Lecture notes in logic; Vol. 12. Wellesley, Mass.: Peters. pp. 20-41
  • Leitgeb, Hannes; Morscher, Edgar (2004)
    Der formale Kalkül SK samt Semantik
    In: Morscher, Edgar (eds.): Was heißt es, ein Recht auf etwas zu haben? Stig und Helle Kangers Analyse der Menschenrechte. Sankt Augustin: Academia. pp. 54-70
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2003)
    A Proxy-Function Argument for the Indeterminacy of Meaning
    In: Hieke, A.; Neumaier, O. (eds.): Philosophie im Geiste Bolzanos ; anläßlich des 222. Geburtstages von Bernard Bolzano ; Edgar Morscher gewidmet. Conceptus-Studien; Vol. 16. Sankt Augustin: Academia. pp. 293-300
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2003)
    Metaphysical Modalities in Scientific Language: A Roadmap of (Im-)Possibilities
    In: Rott, H.; Horak, V. (eds.): Possibility and Reality – Metaphysics and Logic. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Press. pp. 187-219
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2002)
    Poppers Wahrheitstheorie(n)
    In: Morscher, E. (eds.): Was wir Karl R. Popper und seiner Philosophie verdanken ; zu seinem 100. Geburtstag. ProPhil; Vol. 4. Sankt Augustin: Academia. pp. 185-217
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2002)
    Metaworlds: A Possible Worlds Semantics of Truth
    In: Halbach, V.; Horsten, L. (eds.): Principles of Truth. Epistemische Studien; Vol. 1. Frankfurt a. M.: Hänsel-Hohenhausen. pp. 129-151
  • Leitgeb, Hannes (2000)
    Nonmonotonic Reasoning as a Section of a Theory of Rationality
    In: Brogaard, Berit (eds.): Rationality and Irrationality. Beiträge des 23. Internationalen Wittgenstein-Symposiums ; 13. - 19. August, Kirchberg am Wechsel. Kirchberg: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 252-258

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