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Shaughan Lavine

Associate Professor of Philosophy
Ph.D. in Logic and the Methodology of Science, University of California at Berkeley, 1988
Philosophy of Mathematics, Logic, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science

Shaughan Lavine (Ph.D. in Logic and the Methodology of Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1988) taught at Columbia University and in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University before coming to Arizona in 1995. Currently, he is working on a trilogy of books on adaptive semantics, adaptive translation, and the axiomatic method, the common theme of which is that our principles, assumptions, and constraints are provisional and subject to coordinated adjustment. He is on the editorial board of the Lecture Notes in Logic series of the Association for Symbolic Logic.

Current Research

He has published papers and books in the areas of democratic theory, distributive justice, moral philosophy and political philosophy. He is now engaged in projects on the foundations of equality as a principle of distributive justice and on the basis of international justice. He is finishing a book entitled The Constitution of Equality to be published by Oxford University Press.  Some of his recent papers are “The Authority of Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy August 2004; “Is Normative Rational Choice Theory Self-Defeating?” Ethics, October 2004; “A Foundation for Egalitarianism,” in Egalitarianism ed. Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rassmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); “Does Religious Toleration Make Any Sense?” in Social Philosophy ed. Laurence Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006); “Democracy and Bureaucracy”

Selected Publications

  • Understanding the Infinite (Harvard, 1994). Mathematical Reviews 95k:60009.
  • “Something about everything: Universal quantification in the universal sense of universal quantification.” In Agustin Rayo and Gabriel Uzquiano, editors, Absolute Generality, 98–148 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2007).
  • “Finite mathematics,” Synthese 103, 389–420 (1995). Mathematical Reviews 96k:03115.
  • “Generalized reduction theorems for model-theoretic analogs of the class of coanalytic sets,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 58, 81–98 (1993).
  • Gerald Feinberg, Shaughan Lavine, and David Z. Albert, “Knowledge of the past and future,” Journal of Philosophy 89, 607–642 (1992).
  • Here is a (more) complete list.

Teaching

  • Philosophy of Mathematics
  • Philosophy of Language
  • Philosophy of Science
  • Metaphysics
  • Philosophical Logic
  • 20th Century Philosophy
  • Science and Inquiry
  • Issues and Methods in Philosophy

Courses and Discussion

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