University of Manchester (1971-75): Philosophy

After getting my degree in Mathematics, I transferred to Philosophy, doing my M.A. in two years and my Ph.D. in a further two. My supervisor, Wolfe Mays, studied at Cambridge with Richard Braithwaite and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Professor, Czeslaw Lejewski, studied at Warsaw with Stanislaw Lesniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbinski, obtaining his doctorate under Karl Popper in London. Other philosophers at Manchester with whom I interacted included Ted Dawson, John Chidgey and Desmond Henry. The cohort of graduate students included Kevin Mulligan, now Professor in Geneva, and Barry Smith, now Professor in Buffalo and Director of IFOMIS in Saarbrücken. Together we founded the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy, which organized dozens of workshops and propagated the importance of early Central European analytic philosophy from Bolzano to Tarski. We had to fight for ontology then: among the topics we promoted that are now standard fare are tropes, truthmakers and mereology.