Fenner Stanley Tanswell

About me

I am a philosopher at Technische Universität Berlin in the Theoretical Philosophy group led by Axel Gelfert.

My first book on “Mathematical Rigour and Informal Proof” is out now Cambridge Elements in the Philosophy of Mathematics series.

My work is on proofs, rigour, mathematical knowledge, virtues, and formalisation. I have an ongoing project to apply ideas from epistemology—like social epistemology, character epistemology and epistemic injustice—in maths and maths education. More recent work has included more experimental philosophy and environmental philosophy.

I previously worked at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on a project on “Mathematical Values in Data Science”. Before that I was a Lecturer in Mathematics Education in the Department of Mathematics Education at Loughborough University, and was at the University of St Andrews as an Associate Lecturer. Prior to that I was a postdoc at the University of Oxford on the project “The Social Machines of Mathematics” with Ursula Martin.

I did my PhD on the St Andrews/Stirling joint programme, with a thesis entitled “Proof, Rigour and Informality: A Virtue Account of Mathematical Proof”, supervised by Aaron Cotnoir and Patrick Greenough. I did the Master of Logic at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and an MA in Philosophy and Mathematics in St Andrews.

Contact: You can contact me at F.Tanswell (at symbol) TU-Berlin.de or FennerTanswell (at symbol) gmail.com

News

(September 2025) In September, I will be an instructor for the summer school “Pluralism, Pragmatism, Perspectivism”, 15 – 19 September 2025, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. I will be speaking on “Mathematical Rigour Pluralism and Logic-as-Modelling”.

(July 2025) Two new papers have recently been accepted for publication. The first “Trust in Mathematics” (joint with Silvia De Toffoli) is forthcoming in Philosophia Mathematica (III), and the other “The Philosophical Prospects of Large Language Models in the Future of Mathematics” (joint with Ásgeir Berg) is forthcoming in the Annals of Mathematics and Philosophy special issue on Proof.

(June 2025) In June, I will be speaking at the event “Big proof: formalizing mathematics at scale” at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. (link) A video of my talk is available here: (link).

(February 2025) A joint paper with Brendan Larvor and Colin Rittberg entitled “Kneebone and Lakatos: At the Roots of a Dialectical Philosophy of Mathematics” is now available online for the HOPOS journal. (link)

(February 2025) A detailed review of my book by Bonnie Gold has appeared in Philosophia Mathematica (III), (link)

(March 2024) My first book on “Mathematical Rigour and Informal Proof” is out now Cambridge Elements in the Philosophy of Mathematics series.

(February 2024) I will be giving a keynote talk for the 7th Meeting of the Association for the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice in Pavia, Italy in June.

(October 2023) Our paper “Comparative judgement for experimental philosophy: A method for assessing ordinary meaning in vehicles in the park cases” is out in Philosophical Psychology (link) with Ben Davies, Ian Jones, and George Kinnear.

(July 2023) Chris Sangwin and I have an article out in the latest issue of the Mathematical Gazette on “Developing new picture proofs that the first n odd integers are squares” (link).

(February 2023) New paper, led by our PhD student Tuya Sa, out in Review of Philosophy and Psychology on “Do Mathematicians Agree about Mathematical Beauty?” (link) with Tuya Sa, Lara Alcock, and Matthew Inglis. Open Access.

(February 2023) New paper for the Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice on “The Language of Proofs: A Philosophical Corpus Linguistics Study of Instructions and Imperatives in Mathematical Texts” (link) (free preprint) with Matthew Inglis.

(November 2022) New paper out in Ethics, Policy and Environment “The Concept of Extinction: Epistemology, Responsibility, and Precaution” (link). Open Access.

(June 2022) New paper out in Educational Studies in Mathematics “Instructions and recipes in mathematical proofs” (link) with Keith Weber.

(Sept 2021) New paper out in Episteme: “Group Knowledge and Mathematical Collaboration: A Philosophical Examination of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups” (link) with Josh Habgood-Coote.