Kit Fine, NYU professor of Philosophy has, in a career spanning more than thirty years, proved himself exemplary in the areas of research, scholarship and teaching.   His primary field is logic, both technical and mathematical, as well as classical logic in the Aristotelian tradition. Fine’s achievements stretch into the fields of metaphysics and philosophy of language, where his much celebrated work, “Vagueness, Truth and Logic,” is widely thought to have profoundly altered the course of a debate that has been going on among philosophers for thousands of years.  He earned his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Warwick, and took First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics and Economics fromOxford in 1967.   Fine’s teaching is of the highest rank; he is known to be an excellent and inspired teacher with a very broad range spanning introductory undergraduate courses to specialized graduate seminars.   He is the author of two books, Worlds, Times and Selves (1977) and Reasoning with Arbitrary (1985) as well as dozens of papers, critical reviews and two monographs: The Problem of Non-existence I-Internalism (1982) and The Limits of Abstraction.   Fine is the recipient of numerous major awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an ACLS Fellowship. He has been a professor of Philosophy at NYU since 1997.

Essay
Anyone who has thought about the nature of mathematics has probably been puzzled over the status of its objects.  Are the objects with which mathematics deals - numbers, sets, functions and the like - created or are they discovered?  Should we think of them in the manner of the stars and the planets, whose character and existence is entirely independent of our investigations and activities?  Or should we think of them in the manner of the objects of fiction, whose existence and character is entirely dependent upon what their authors make of them? More...

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