Prof. DDr. Hannes Leitgeb

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.

Hannes Leitgeb is the PI of a German Research Fund (DFG) project on Syntactic Approaches to Interacting Modalities. 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 is 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 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.

At present, Hannes Leitgeb is writing two monographs: In the one that is provisionally titled Speaking from Experience he tries to resurrect Carnap's Logical Structure of the World; the other one is called From Degrees of Belief to Belief Simpliciter and develops a unified theory of qualitative and quantitative belief.

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 (which is meant to include the 10 best papers in philosophy in 2010, see http://www.philosophersannual.org).

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

• "The Review Paradox. A Note on the Diachronic Costs of Not Closing Rational Belief Under Conjunction", forthcoming in Nous.
• "A Probabilistic Semantics for Counterfactuals. Part A", Review of Symbolic Logic 5 (2012), 16-84.
• "How Serious is the Paradox of Serious Possibility?" (with S. Duca), Mind 121/481 (2012), 1-36.