Prof. Dr. Matthias Schirn

Personal information

I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Freiburg in 1974 with a thesis on identity and synonymy in logic and semantics and subsequently taught at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and at Michigan State University. My research during this time focused on theories of meaning for natural languages and intensional semantics, and I continued working in this area at the University of California at Berkeley, St. John’s College (Oxford), Harvard University and at Wolfson College (Oxford). In 1985, I was awarded my habilitation at the University of Regensburg (Dr. phil. habil.). Since 1987 I have held a distinguished Fiebiger-Professorship at LMU Munich and since 2012 I have been a member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

My main research areas are the philosophy of logic and mathematics, proof theory, philosophy of language and epistemology. I have also taught at the University of Minnesota (1989), the State University of Campinas (1991), the Catholic University of São Paulo (1998), the National University of Buenos Aires (1992), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1993, 1994, 1997), the National University San Marcos in Lima (2009) and numerous other universities in Europe and Latin America. I have given invited lectures at the most prestigious universities in Europe, Asia, Latin America and South Africa as well as at some of the most distinguished universities in the United States of America and Australia. In 2014, I delivered a series of lectures on Frege’s philosophy of mathematics at the University of Oxford and carried out related research at Wolfson College. In the same year, I was invited to work as a research professor at Kyoto University and received a research fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. My hobbies are the Romance languages, Latin American literature, visits to “exotic” countries around the world, chamber music and modern jazz, and sport (currently only road racing and swimming).

Selected publications

1. Frege’s Approach to the Foundations of Analysis (1874-1903). History and Philosophy of Logic 34 (2013), 266-292.
2. Frege’s Logicism and the Neo-Fregean Project. Axiomathes 24 (2014), 207-243.
3. The Semantics of Value-Range Names and Frege’s Proof of Referentiality. The Review of Symbolic Logic 11 (2018) 224-278.
4. Finitist Consistency Proofs and the Impact of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems on Hilbert’s Metamathematics. Journal of Applied Logics 5 (2018), 1273-1300.
5. The Finite and the Infinite: On Hilbert’s Formalist Approach Before and After Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Logique et Analyse 62 (2019), 1-34.
6. Frege’s Philosophy of Geometry, Synthese 196 (2019), 929-971.
7. Second-Order Abstraction Before and After Russell’s Paradox. In: Essays on Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic, eds. P. A. Ebert and M. Rossberg, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2019, 437-496.
8. Frege on the Introduction of Real and Complex Numbers by Abstraction and Cross-Sortal Identity Claims. Synthese, published online and Open Access 26 May 2023.
9. Identity and the Cognitive Value of Logical Equations in Frege’s Foundational Project. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 64 (2023), 495-544.
10. On Wittgenstein’s Dispensation With “=” in the Tractatus and Its Philosophical Background. A Critical Study. Acta Analytica, published online and Open Access 11 January 2024.