Professor Tait, a leading figure in philosophy of mathematics, was emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught for nearly a quarter-century. Matt Boyle, Chair of the Department here, kindly shared a memorial notice, that is below the fold. Comments are also open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Tait or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work. (Memorial notice follows.)
William W. Tait, one of the most distinguished philosophers of mathematics in the second half of the 20th century, died at home in Hyde Park on March 15, at the age of 95.
Bill began teaching at the University from Chicago in 1972, retiring in 1996. After retirement, he remained active in his research, including giving the prestigious Scholem Lectures and Tarski Lectures. He was a central figure in a group of faculty—including David Malament, Howard Stein, Ian Mueller, Bill Wimsatt, and Leonard Linsky—who made Chicago the place to study the philosophy and history of physics and mathematics, logic, biology, and figures like Frege and Russell, Earlier, he taught at Stanford University (1958-64), the University of Illinois-Chicago (1965-71), and Aarhus University (1971-72). He was Philosophy Department chair from 1981 to 1987. In 2002, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Bill was a central contributor to the development of proof theory, and so also to logic and the philosophy of mathematics. In his early years he provided an original study of functionals of transfinite type, with results that later also found applications in combinatory logic and the lambda calculus. Later, Bill moved to considering the philosophical aspects of the constructivist means used in such work. A well-known outcome was his article “Finitism” (1981), in which he argued for an understanding of Hilbertian finitism in terms of primitive recursive arithmetic. Bill also wrote important historical-philosophical studies of main figures in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, most notably Georg Cantor, Ernst Zermelo, and Kurt Gödel. He was the author of The Provenance of Pure Reason: Essays in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Its History (2005) and the editor of Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein (1996).
Bill was an avid climber, a marvelous colleague, and always had a twinkle in his eye. But his sweetness was coupled with a fierce moral determination that made him, as Chair, a lion on behalf of the department and its faculty and a colossal pain to the administration.
Bill and recently deceased Professor of Philosophy Howard Stein were great friends and Philosophy Department colleagues for decades. They were born one day apart and died within a week of each other.
