Charles Parsons

Charles Dacre Parsons (April 13, 1933 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of mathematics and the study of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He was professor emeritus at Harvard University. In a 2014 review of one of his books, Stewart Shapiro and Teresa Kouri said of Parsons: "It surely goes without saying that [he] is one of the most important philosophers of mathematics in our generation".

Life and career Born on April 13, 1933, Charles Dacre Parsons was a son of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1961, under the direction of Burton Dreben and Willard Van Orman Quine. He taught for many years at Columbia University before moving to Harvard University in 1989.

Among his doctoral students were Michael Levin, James Higginbotham, Peter Ludlow, Gila Sher, and Øystein Linnebo.

In 2017 Parsons gave the Gödel Lecture, titled "Gödel and the Universe of Sets".

Parsons died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 19, 2024, at the age of 91.

Philosophical work In addition to his work in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, Parsons was an editor, with Solomon Feferman and others, of the posthumous works of Kurt Gödel. He has also written on historical figures, especially Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, Kurt Gödel, and Willard Van Orman Quine.

Selected publications Books 1983. Mathematics in Philosophy: Selected Essays. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press. 2008. Mathematical Thought and its Objects. Cambridge Univ. Press. 2012. From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard Univ. Press. 2014a. Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard Univ. Press.

Articles 1987. "Developing Arithmetic in Set Theory without infinity: Some Historical Remarks". History and Philosophy of Logic, vol. 8, pp. 201–213. 1990a. "The Uniqueness of the Natural Numbers". Iyyun, vol. 39, pp. 13–44. ISSN 0021-3306. 1990b. "The Structuralist View of Mathematical Objects". Synthese, vol. 84 (3), pp. 303–346. 2014b. "Analyticity for Realists". In Interpreting Gödel: Critical Essays, ed. J. Kennedy. Cambridge University Press, pp. 131–150.