The Formal Turn - The Emergence of Formalism in Twentieth-Century Thought

Formalism became ever more important in the first half of the 20th century. The EU-funded FORMALISM project seeks to explore the early contributions to formalism in 20th century thought in order to determine how these early contributions impacted contemporary debates on model theory, inferentialism and scientific theories. It will conduct three interrelated subprojects to do this. Under the first, the focus will be historical, mathematical and philosophical. The second will examine logic and logical empiricism between 1920 and 1940. The philosophical implications of formalism’s growth will be analysed in the third subproject.