John MacFarlane

John MacFarlane is an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley interested in logic and metaphysics. He has made influential contributions to truth-value theory inferential semantics. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also known for his contributions to open source software, especially the Pandoc document converter and other Markdown parsers and verifiers. MacFarlane was among the group of people that helped launch the CommonMark standardization effort for Markdown. Education MacFarlane earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Harvard University and a PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Career and research Most of McFarlane's work is in the philosophy of logic and language. Other research interests include metaphysics and epistemology, the philosophy of mathematics, philosophical logic, the history of logic, Frege, Kant and ancient philosophy particularly Aristotle. Normativity of Logic With respect to the normativity of logic for human thought, MacFarlane defends a certain claim made by Frege, a German mathematician and logician. In his book "The Foundational Laws of Arithmetic", which is a follow-up work to "The Foundations of Arithmetic" (1884), Frege claims to have overcome the limitations of Kant's logic, and MacFarlane acknowledges this. MacFarlane elaborates the idea in Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism (2002): The comparability of Frege's and Kant's systems is disputed in scholarly discourse. MacFarlane argues that the systems are indeed comparable, because both thinkers Kant and Frege define logic fundamentally by its generality as a central characteristic. Accordingly, Frege's approach is suited to overcome Kant's.