Kenny Easwaran

me

I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Program in Logic and Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley, studying with Branden Fitelson. As of August 2008, I will be an Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. From June to December of 2008 and 2009 I will be on leave as a Visiting Fellow at the philosophy department in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. I got undergraduate degrees in mathematics, music, and philosophy at Stanford University in June, 2002. During the summers I have often worked at the Canada/USA Mathcamp, a program for high school students that shifts around from campus to campus each summer. If you would like to contact me, use my last name @gmail.com.

My dissertation is titled "The Foundations of Conditional Probability". Here is a statement of my research interests (including an abstract of the dissertation). My CV is available here. (Both links are .pdf files.) My primary writing sample is What Conditional Probability Must (Almost) Be, and my other two writing samples are The Role of Axioms in Mathematics and Strong and Weak Expectations.

Publications:

Some other philosophical writings:
  • Antimeta - a philosophy of math blog that I have maintained since January 2005.
  • Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants - a philosophy group blog run by Brian Weatherson, which I sometimes contribute to.
  • What Conditional Probability Must (Almost) Be. (Presented at FEW 2005.) This paper has become the core of my dissertation, though I have split up different parts of the argument into different chapters and different contexts.
  • Dominance-Based Decision Theory - a draft I have been working on giving foundations for decision theory in terms of dominance and an indifference relation, rather than expected utility or anything of the like. My arguments involve several paradoxes involving the infinite in decision theory. I need to learn more of the literature from statistics and economics that is relevant to this project. Here are slides from some talks I gave on this paper in May/June '06.
  • The Uniformity of Knowledge Attributions - January '06, for Lynn Nichols' class on syntax. I presented this at the UT Austin Graduate Philosophy Conference in April 2006. In this paper I respond to Stanley and Williamson's "Knowing How", where they argue on syntactic grounds, that the semantics of knowledge-how attributions must be the same as those of knowledge-that attributions. I don't directly contest their claim, but instead just argue that they have ignored the possibility of syntactic ambiguity, and I point out three related constructions with "know" that are in fact ambiguous in ways that might threaten their identification.
  • A Gricean Account of Subjunctive Conditionals - written in December '04, for Branden Fitelson's seminar on conditionals. I argue that a certain deductive account of the semantics of counterfactuals is better than standard accounts invoking possible worlds. (I'm no longer sure if I agree with the conclusions of this paper.)

Some expository writing on logic and set theory:
  • Problems to use to teach oneself basic set theory - August '04. These problems introduce all the axioms of ZFC and give an understanding of how to use them, and in particular the Axiom of Choice and the principle of transfinite induction. Then they develop standard results in the arithmetic of transfinite ordinals and cardinals.
  • A Cheerful Introduction to Forcing - December 2005. Also on the arXiv. Hopefully a somewhat more accessible introduction to the method of forcing in set theory than what is available elsewhere, culminating in proofs of the consistency of ZFC both with the Continuum Hypothesis and its negation. However, it's of course still quite technical. (Richard Zach has collected links to a few others.)
  • Notes on ordinals and cardinals - lecture notes from a class I taught at Canada/USA Mathcamp in July 2006 on ordinals and cardinals. The lecture notes are somewhat sketchy, but I've included a lot of problems. It covers somewhat more material than the other set theory notes, but in less detail. More so than with the other notes, several exercises are adapted from the books by Kunen and Levy.
  • Notes on Gödel's Theorems - notes adapted from the handouts from a class I taught at Canada/USA Mathcamp in July 2007 on Gödel's theorems. It contains basically complete proofs of both the Completeness and Incompleteness theorems, partly through exercises. There is of course much more to be said about each theorem than I did.

Other things:

Some non-philosophical things I have written for classes: