User:Fleur Sheridan/sandbox/William Thompson Boos

New article name goes here new article content ... William Thompson Boos William Boos (1943-2014) was a mathematician and philosopher whose work chiefly centered on the intersection of metamathematics and problems of philosophical certainty from the classical period to the twentieth century.

Life: Born March 16, 1943 in Janesville, Wis., William Boos was the son of Ethel Connell Boos and Col. Francis H. Boos. As the child of a military officer he lived in several places during boyhood, among them Taiwan, Tehran, Colorado, Kentucky and Fort Sheridan and Glenview, Ill. After graduating from New Trier Township High School in 1960, William studied German at the University of Heidelberg and obtained degrees in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin (B.A., 1964), the University of Massachusetts (M.A., 1965), and the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D., 1971), where he special�ized in set theory. After teaching mathematics for some years, he returned to the University of Chicago for a Ph.D. in philosophical logic (1981). Over the course of his life he taught philosophy at the universities of North Carolina, New Mexico,Copenhagen and British Columbia, and mathematics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Iowa. He also enjoyed a brief period of work at the Wittgenstein Archive in Bergen, Norway.

William Boos married Florence Saunders (b. 1943) in 1965, and their son Eugene Christian Boos was born in 1972. He loved classical music and the study of European languages, among them German, French, Latin, Greek, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic, and he shared academic semesters abroad with his wife Florence in Ice�land, Denmark, France, and Cambridge, England. A gifted and rigorous stylist, Boos helped edit his wife’s writings on 19th Century literature. A pacifist and conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, over the years he worked for several political campaigns on behalf of anti-war candidates. William also loved mountain scenery, and designed a cabin for his family on the Sunshine Coast, British Colum�bia, facing mountains and overlooking water. In private life, he was a man of orderly and frugal habits, greatly attached to his family and close friends. William died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest at his Iowa City home on April 1, 2014.

Publications:

His publications applied mathematical models to classical philosophical problems in epistemology. Throughout his life he worked on what became a thousand page manuscript titled "Boundaries of Experience," of which 10 chapters were edited by Florence Boos and published as Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition (De Gruyter, 2018). This volume explores in historical depth the relationship between fundamental philosophical quandaries regarding self-reference and meta-mathematical notions of consistency and incompleteness. Using the insights of twentieth-century logicians from Gödel through Hilbert and their successors, Boos considers the writings of Aristotle, the ancient skeptics, Anselm, and enlightenment and seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Pascal, Descartes, and Kant to identify ways in which these both encode and evade problems of a priori definition and self-reference. The final chapters critique and extend more recent insights of late 20th-century logicians and quantum physicists, and offer applications of the completeness theorem as a means of exploring "metatheoretical ascent" and the limitations of scientific certainty. Broadly syncretic in range, Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition addresses central and recurring problems of interest to historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, particularly scholars of classical skepticism, the Enlightenment, Kant, ethics, and mathematical logic.

Boos also published articles on mathematics and several on intellectual history co-published with Florence Boos. Selected publications include the following:

Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition, December 2018 Walter De Gruyter DOI: 10.1515/9783110572452 Lectures on large cardinal axioms, January 1970 DOI: 10.1007/BFb0079417 ⊨ISILC Logic Conference, ed. Gert Muller et al. Kiel, 1974. Infinitary Compactness without Strong Inaccessibility, March 1976, Journal of Symbolic Logic 41(1)DOI: 10.2307/2272942 Boolean Extensions which Efface the Mahlo Property, June 1974, Journal of Symbolic Logic 39(2)DOI: 10.2307/2272638 Stochastic representations of Feynman integration, December 2007, Journal of Mathematical Physics 48(12):122106-122106-18 DOI: 10.1063/1.2812416 Mathematical quantum theory I: Random ultrafilters as hidden variables, April 1996, Synthese 107(1):83-143 DOI: 10.1007/BF00413903 Reflective inquiry and "The Fate of Reason," October 2014 Synthese 191(18):4253-4314 DOI: 10.1007/s11229-014-0533-z Virtual Modality, September 2003 Synthese 136(3):435-492 DOI: 10.1023/A:1025101329309 Theory‐relative Skepticism, May 2007 dialectica 41(3):175 - 207 DOI: 10.1111/j.1746-8361.1987.tb00887.x “Parfaits miroirs de l’univers”: A ‘virtual’ interpretation of Leibnizian metaphysics, August 2003 Synthese 136: 281-304 DOI: 10.1023/A:1024745012471 A Metalogical Critique of Wittgensteinian ‘Phenomenology,’ in Quantifiers, Questions and Quantum Physics, ed. D. Kolak and J. Symons, Springer 2004, 75-99. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-32110-0_5 The Transzendenz of Mathematical ‘Experience’, January 1998, Synthese 114(1):49-98 DOI: 10.1023/A:1005085922564 Mathematical quantum theory I: Random ultrafilters as hidden variables, April 1996, Synthese 107(1):83-143 DOI: 10.1007/BF00413903 Thoralf Skolem, Hermann Weyl and “Das Gefühl der Welt als Begrenztes Ganzes,” January 1995, in From Dedekind to Gödel, ed. Jakko Hintikka, 283-329 DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8478-4_12 The world, the flesh and the argument from design, October 1994, Synthese 101(1):15-52 DOI: 10.1007/BF01063967 Consistency and Konsistenz, April 1987, Erkenntnis 26(1):1-43 DOI: 10.1007/BF00166348 A self-referential ‘cogito’, September 1983, Philosophical Studies 44(2):269-290 DOI: 10.1007/BF00354107 Limits of inquiry, September 1983, Erkenntnis 20(2):157-194 DOI: 10.1007/BF00153958 “The True” in Gottlob Frege's “Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie,” January 1985, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 34(1):141-192 DOI: 10.1007/BF00329904 "Cynics and Cyrenaics," in J. J. Chambliss, ed., Philosophy of Education, New York: Garland, 1996. Minimally Connective, Auto-associative, Neural Networks, January 1994, Connection Science 6(4):461-469 DOI: 10.1080/09540099408915734 Sparsely Connected, Hebbian Networks with Strikingly Large Storage Capacities, July 1997, with David Vogel, Neural networks: the official journal of the International Neural Network Society 10(4):671-682 DOI: 10.1016/S0893-6080(96)00099-8 Orwell's Morris and ‘Old Major's’ dream, August 1990, English Studies 71(4):361-371, with Florence Boos DOI: 10.1080/00138389008598703 News From Nowhere and Victorian Socialist-Feminism, January 1990, Nineteenth Century Contexts 14(1):3-32, with Florence Boos DOI: 10.1080/08905499008583309

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