Jesús Mosterín

Jesús Mosterín (born 1941) is a leading Spanish philosopher and a thinker of broad spectrum, often at the frontier between science and philosophy.

He was born in Bilbao in 1941. He studied in Spain, Germany and the USA. Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Barcelona since 1983, he founded there an active Department of Logic, Philosophy and History of Science. Since 1996, he has been Research Professor at the National Research Council of Spain (CSIC). He is a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh and a member of several international academies. He has played a crucial role in the introduction of mathematical logic, analytical philosophy and philosophy of science in Spain and Latin America. Besides his academic duties, he has fulfilled important functions in the international publishing industry, especially in the Salvat and Hachette groups. He has been actively involved in the protection of wildlife and its defense in the mass media.

Mosterín acquired his initial logical formation at the Institut für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung in Münster (Germany). He published the first modern and rigorous textbooks of logic and set theory in Spanish. He has worked on topics of first and second order logic, axiomatic set theory, computability and complexity. He has shown how the uniform digitalization of each type of symbolic object (such as chromosomes, texts, pictures, movies or pieces of music) can be considered to implement a certain positional numbering system. This result gives a precise meaning to the notion that the set of natural numbers constitutes a universal library and indeed a universal data base. Mosterín has edited the first edition of the complete works of Kurt Gödel in any language. Together with Thomas Bonk, he has edited an unpublished book of Rudolf Carnap on axiomatics (in German). He has also delved in the historical and biographical aspects of the development of modern logic, as shown in his original work on the lives of Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, Bertrand Russell, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, intertwined with a formal analysis of their main technical contributions.

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