Overview of the Conference

The M&NIP conference is a meeting of intellectuals reflecting on the following (meta)philosophical issue: what is there in the realm of mathematics, or in the realm of quantitative thinking, that makes its influence on philosophy so significant and varying? From Aristotle to Russell, developments in mathematical thinking have shaped the nature of philosophical discourse. From Pythagoras’s employment of measure to Lacan’s use of topology, philosophers of wildly disparate eras and schools of thought have relied on mathematical concepts to elaborate their ideas.

Because the conference wants to travel to the very nerve of what constitutes philosophical cognition, in accepting papers we did not prefer any one methodology or approach over another. 

The conference's theme covers a diverse array of investigations, inter alia: 

• mathematical expositions within formal logic, 
• logical innovations in formal epistemology, 
• historical cases of cooperation or conflict between mathematics and philosophy, 
• and the role of numbers and other mathematical concepts in inspiring gnosis or political change.

The conference will be held at Stanford University on April 1, 2020. A detailed program will follow in the second half of February.