A welcome addition to Maddy's project of articulating Second Philosophy. The breadth and depth of her investigations, including forays into the history and philosophy of early modern science and philosophy, questions about the proper direction and methods of philosophy of science, the relation between ordinary language philosophy and the sciences, and extensive interpretation and analysis of questions in philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, inspire awe. Maddy has the curiosity and philosophical acumen that are so fully on display in the Second Philosopher. She embodies an integrated history and philosophy of science that is informed by actual science and extracts its philosophical frameworks from the investigation of real cases. I commend the volume to a broad audience, whose members find themselves curious about the various topics as described.
Penelope Maddy earned a BA in mathematics from the University of California, Berkelely, and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University. She has held faculty positions at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of California at Irvine. Maddy is the author of Realism in Mathematics, Naturalism in Mathematics (winner of the 2002 Lakatos Award), Second Philosophy, Defending the Axioms, The Logical Must, and What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy, all published with Oxford University Press. Maddy is a former President of the Association for Symbolic Logic and of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division), and a current Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.