Paul Benacerraf

Who is Paul Benacerraf?

Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who has been teaching at Princeton University since he joined the faculty in 1960. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and recently retired as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy.

He was born in Paris to parents who were Sephardic Jews from Morocco. His brother was the Venezuelan Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Baruj Benacerraf.

Benacerraf is perhaps best known for his two papers What Numbers Could Not Be and Mathematical Truth, and for his anthology on the philosophy of mathematics, co-edited with Hilary Putnam. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

In What Numbers Could Not Be, he argues against a Platonist view of mathematics, and for structuralism, on the ground that what is important about numbers is the abstract structures they represent rather than the objects that number words ostensibly refer to. In particular, this argument is based on the point that Zermelo and von Neumann give distinct, and completely adequate, identifications of natural numbers with sets.