Walter Dean

Contact: Walter Dean (W.H.Dean@warwick.ac.uk) Associate Professor Department of Philosophy University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL Office: Social Studies S2.70 Current project: For 2026-2029, I am the UK PI of the AHRC-DFG funded project "The mathematical turn in philosophy: measurement, computation, (de)idealization". For 2022-2023, I was a fellow of the French Institute for Advanced Study host by the Institut d'études avancée de Paris. In 2021-2021, I was a von Humboldt fellow at the MCMP in Munich. Education: PhD Computer Science (2010, CUNY), PhD Philosophy (2007, Rutgers), MSc Logic (1999, Amsterdam) Interests: Philosophy of mathematics, mathematical and philosophical logic, theoretical computer science, history and philosophy of computation. Mathematics and Philosophy Degree: I am the Philosophy convenor of the Mathematics and Philosophy joint degrees. (See our events page here.) Please contact me if you have any questions about the degrees or are considering post-graduate work at Warwick in logic or philosophy of mathematics.

Publications:

• "On the methodology of informal rigour: Set theory, semantics, and intuitionism" (with Hidenori Kurokawa, forthcoming in the Journal of Symbolic Logic).

• "Artificial intelligence and inherent mathematical difficulty" (with Alberto Naibo) Philosophia Mathematica, 33(3):283-329, 2025.

• "On open questions, artificial intelligence, and mathematical difficulty: A précis. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, 33(3):172-177, 2025.
• "From real analysis to the sorites paradox via reverse mathematics" (with Sam Sanders) The Review of Symbolic Logic, 18(3):900-926, 2025.
• "On consistency and existence in mathematics", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 120 (3), pp. 349–393.
• "Recursive functions" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Bernays, Paul Isaak (1888-1977). In The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers
• "Incompleteness via paradox and completeness", Review of Symbolic Logic, 2019, pp. 1-50.emati
• "Computational complexity theory and the philosophy of mathematics", Philosophia Mathematica, 27(3), pp. 381-439.
• "Strict finitism, feasibility and the sorites", Review of Symbolic Logic, 2018, 11(2), pp.295-346.
• "The Prehistory of the Subsystems of Second-Order Arithmetic" (with Sean Walsh), Review of Symbolic Logic, 10(2), pp. 357-396.
• "Bernays and the completeness theorem", Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, 2017, 25, pp. 45-55.
• "Algorithms and the mathematical foundations of computer science", in The Limits of Mathematical Knowledge, L. Horsten and P. Welch (eds.). Oxford University Press, 2016.
• "Squeezing feasibility", in Pursuit of the Universal: 12th Conference on Computability in Europe, CiE 2016, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp 78-88.
• "Computational Complexity Theory", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Kreisel’s Theory of Constructions, the Kreisel-Goodman paradox, and the second clause" (with Hidenori Kurokawa), Advances in proof theoretic semantics, T. Piecha and P. Schroeder-Heister (eds.), Springer Trends in Logic.
• "Arithmetical reflection and the provability of soundness", Philosophia Mathematica.
• "Explicit modal logic, informal provability and Montague's Paradox", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 55 (2), 2014.
• "Models and computability", Philosophia Mathematica.
• "The paradox of the Knower revisited" (with Hidenori Kurokawa), Annals of Pure and Applied Logic.
• "The Logic of Campaigning" (with Rohit Parikh), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6521:38-49.
• "From the Knowability Paradox to the existence of proofs" (with Hidenori Kurokawa), Synthese, 176:177–225.
• "Knowledge, proof and the Knower" (with Hidenori Kurokawa), Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (Stanford), p. 81-90.
• “Algorithms and Ontology” Proceedings of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria.
• “The Knower Paradox and the Quantified Logic of Proofs” (with Hidenori Kurokawa), Proceedings of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria.
• “On Moschovakis’s theory of algorithmic identity”, Proceedings of the 7th Panhellenic Logic Symposium, Volos, Greece.