John Corcoran

Who is John Corcoran?

John Corcoran is a logician, philosopher, mathematician, and historian of logic. He is best known for his philosophical work on concepts such as the nature of inference, relations between conditions, argument-deduction-proof distinctions, the relationship between logic and epistemology, and the place of proof theory and model theory in logic. Eight of Corcoran’s papers have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Persian; his 1989 "signature" essay was translated into all three languages. Fourteen of his papers have been reprinted; one was reprinted twice.

His work on Aristotle’s logic of the Prior Analytics is regarded as being highly faithful both to the Greek text and to the historical context. It is the basis for many subsequent investigations. It was adopted for the 1989 translation of the Prior Analytics by Robin Smith and for the 2009 translation of the Prior Analytics Book A by Gisela Striker. His mathematical results on definitional equivalence of formal string theories, sciences of strings of characters over finite alphabets, are foundational for logic, formal linguistics, and computer science.