Fenner Stanley Tanswell

News

(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.

About me

I am a philosopher at Technische Universität Berlin and a Visiting Fellow at the Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough University.

My work is on proofs, 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.

I have 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 have been a Lecturer in 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@lboro.ac.uk or FennerTanswell@gmail.com