JAMES FRANKLIN
Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UNSW
Brief History,
Research interests,
Publications,
Opinions and News,
Student Supervision.
Email:
j.franklin@unsw.edu.au
Telephone:
+61 - 2 - 9385 7093
Fax:
+61 - 2 - 9385 7123
Mail:
School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052
Australia
Office:
Red Centre rm 6109
My undergraduate work was at
the University of Sydney
(1971-75). I completed my PhD in 1981 at
Warwick University, on algebraic groups.
Since 1981 I have taught in Mathematics at UNSW ...
Wikipedia article.
My book What Science Knows: And How It Knows It (Encounter Books) appeared in 2009 ... blurb and video ... review ... another ... buy online ... more info
My edited book, Life to the Full: Rights and Social Justice in Australia appeared in November 2007.
... report... introduction... review... Philosopher's Zone interview... Counterpoint interview... Sydney book launch... buy online.
My book
Catholic Values and Australian Realities appeared in 2006 ... buy online ... review ... comments ... Cardinal Pell's comment
My book
Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia
was published by Macleay Press in 2003.
The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal
(Johns Hopkins University Press) appeared in 2001.
(The
contents
can be viewed here; also the
latest review;
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews review; the
Wall Street Journal's review;
Science's review;
Quadrant's review.
I am the principal author of a textbook,
Proof in Mathematics: An Introduction
(Quakers Hill Press, 1996), originally published
as Introduction to Proofs in Mathematics (Prentice Hall, 1988).
Research areas include the structuralist philosophy
of mathematics and the 'formal sciences' (I am a member of the Sydney School),
Australian Catholic history, the parallel between ethics and mathematics,
restraint,
the quantification of rights in applied ethics, and the analysis of extreme risks.
Below are my recent papers.
-
A. Newstead and J. Franklin, Indispensability without Platonism, in Properties, Powers and Structures, ed. A. Bird, B. Ellis and H. Sankey (Routledge, New York, 2012), 81-97.
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Global justice: an anti-collectivist and pro-causal ethic, Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics, 2 (1) (2012).
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The objective Bayesian conceptualisation of proof and reference class problems, Sydney Law Review 33 (2011), 545-61.
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Aristotelianism in the philosophy of mathematics, Studia Neoaristotelica 8 (2011), 3-15.
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S.W.K. Chan and J. Franklin, A text-based decision support system for financial sequence prediction, Decision Support Systems, 2011.
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The complexity obstacle, Australian Literary Review 6 Apr 2011, 18-19.
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Caritas in Veritate: Economic Activity as Personal Encounter and the Economy of Gratuitousness, Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics 1 (1) (2011).
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The Grameen Bank and the way out of world poverty, Annals Australasia no. 122 (Apr/May 2011), 28-29.
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The postmodern calculus, New Criterion 29 (1) (Sept 2010), 75-80.
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Cardinal directions, Quadrant, July/Aug 2010.
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A. Newstead & J. Franklin, The epistemology of geometry I: the problem of exactness, ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, 2010, pp. 254-260.
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Feature selection methods for solving the reference class problem, Columbia Law Review Sidebar, Mar 2010.
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Aristotelian realism, chapter in The Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. A. Irvine (Handbook of the Philosophy of Science series, North-Holland Elsevier, 2009), 101-153.
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Calwell, Catholicism and the origins of multicultural Australia, Proc. of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 2009 Conference, 42-54.
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The lure of philosophy in Sydney, Quadrant, 53 (19) (Oct, 2009), 76-79.
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Evidence gained from torture: wishful thinking, checkability and extreme circumstances, Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law, 17 (2) (2009), 281-90.
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The cultural roots of Aboriginal violence, Quadrant 52 (11) (Nov, 2008), 22-25.
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Operational risk under Basel II: A model for extreme risk evaluation, Banking
and Financial Services Policy Report 27 (10) (Oct 2008), 10-16.
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J. Franklin, S.A. Sisson, M.A. Burgman and J.K. Martin, Evaluating extreme risks in invasion ecology: learning from banking compliance, Diversity and Distributions 14 (2008), 581-91... story.
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A. Newstead and J. Franklin, On the reality of the continuum, Philosophy 83 (2008), 117-27.
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International compliance regimes: a public sector without restraints, Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 9 (2) 2007, 86-95.
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Jenness Warin (with J. Franklin), Remote Aboriginal Communities: Why the trade in girls and other human rights abuses remain hidden, Bennelong Society occasional paper, 2007.
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(with S. Sisson) Assessment of strategies for evaluating extreme risks, ACERA report, Mar 2007.
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Natural law ethics in disciplines abstract to applied, Federation of Catholic Scholars Conference, April 2007.
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Case comment: quantification of the 'proof beyond reasonable doubt' standard, Law, Probability and Risk, 5 (2006).
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Australia's wackiest postmodernists, Mercatornet, June 2006.
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Chapter on 'Artifice and the natural world: Mathematics, logic, technology' in
Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Philosophy,
ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 817-53.
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Risk-driven global compliance regimes in banking and accounting: the new Law Merchant, Law,
Probability and Risk 4 (2005), 237-50.
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Traditional Catholic philosophy - baby and bathwater, in Issues for Church and Society, ed. M. Whelan (St Pauls, 2006), 15-32.
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Preface to Enemy
Aliens: The Internment of Italian Migrants During the Second World War
-
A "Professional issues and ethics in mathematics" course, Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Soc 32 (2005), 98-100.
-
Is Jensenism compatible
with Christianity? Quadrant 48 (12) (Dec 2004), 30-1
... Michael Jensen's reply ... my response ... Sydney Anglicans forum
-
On the parallel
between mathematics and morals, Philosophy 79 (2004), 97-119.
- J. Franklin & S.C. Tueno,
Low fertility among women graduates,
People and Place 12 (1) (2004), 37-44.
- S. Campbell & J. Franklin,
Randomness and induction, Synthese 138 (2004), 79-99.
-
The representation of
context: ideas from artificial intelligence, Law, Probability and Risk
2 (2003), 191-99.
- J. Franklin & S.C. Tueno,
Graduate and childless, Quadrant 47 (7/8) (July/Aug, 2003), 52-55.
- S.W.K. Chan & J. Franklin,
Dynamic context generation
for natural language understanding: A multifaceted knowledge
approach,
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: A 33 (2003), 23-41.
- Stove's
discovery of the worst argument in the world, Philosophy
77 (2002), 615-24.
(html)
- Two caricatures II:
Leibniz's best world, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52 (2002), 45-56.
(Shorter version: Leibniz's solution to the problem of evil, Think 5 (2003), 97-101)
- Immigration versus democracy,
IPA Review 54 (2) (2002), 29.
-
A "Professional issues" course: grounding philosophy in workplace
realities, Pantaneto Forum 7 (2002).
-
Resurrecting logical probability Erkenntnis
55 (2001), 277-305.
-
Regulated capitalism,
market socialism Dissent no. 5 (2001), 11-13.
-
The Sokal hoax and postmodernist embarrassment
Continuum 14 (2000), 359-62.
-
Thomas Kuhn's irrationalism
New Criterion 18 (10) (June 2000), 29-34.
(comment)
-
Last bastion of reason, New Criterion 18 (9) (May 2000), 74-8.
- Diagrammatic reasoning and modelling in the imagination: the secret
weapons of the Scientific Revolution, in
1543 and All That: Image and Word, Change and Continuity in the
Proto-Scientific Revolution,
ed. G. Freeland & A. Corones (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2000), pp. 53-115.
- The Sydney philosophy disturbances, Quadrant
43 (4) (Apr, 1999), 16-21.
-
Accountancy as computational casuistics, Eureka Street
9 (1) (Jan/Feb, 1999), 2, 43-6... updated 2007 version
(winner of Eureka Street Ethics Essay Competition;
reprinted in Australian Accounting Review 9 (2) (July, 1999), 36-43,
in Business and Professional Ethics Journal 17 (4)
(Winter, 1998), 31-37
and in Values Autumn, 1999; excerpted in City Ethics
34 (Summer, 1999).)
- Catholics versus Masons, Journal of the Australian
Catholic Historical Society 20 (1999), 1-15.
- S.W.K. Chan and J. Franklin,
Symbolic connectionism in natural language disambiguation,
IEEE Trans. on Neural Networks, 9 (1998), 739-55.
-
Two caricatures, I: Pascal's Wager,
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion
44 (1998), 109-14.
(Abstract)
- D.R. Bellhouse and J. Franklin, The language of chance,
International Statistical Review
65 (1997), 73-85.
- Stove's anti-Darwinism,
Philosophy
72 (1997), 133-6.
- Where is mathematics going?,
Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society
24 (1997), 114-9.
-
How a neural net grows symbols,
Proceedings of the Seventh Australian Conference on Neural Networks,
Canberra, 1996, 91-6.
- Catholic thought and Catholic Action: Dr Paddy Ryan MSC and the Red Peril,
Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society
17 (1996), 44-55.
(Summary in ADB article on Ryan)
- The Sokal hoax,
Philosopher
1 (4) (1996), 21-4.
Selected older publications:
- J. Franklin & R.J. Stove, eds,
Cricket versus Republicanism,
by D.C. Stove (Quakers Hill Press, Sydney, 1995) (with introduction
and bibliography by J. Franklin).
- The formal sciences discover the philosophers' stone,
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science,
25 (1994), 513-33 (Math Reviews's summary;
later
discussion)
- Achievements and fallacies in Hume's account of infinite divisibility,
Hume Studies
20 (1994), 85-101.
- R.K. Templeton & J. Franklin, Adaptive information and animal behaviour: why motorists stop at red traffic lights,
Evolutionary Theory 10 (1992), 145-55.
- Healthy scepticism,
Philosophy
66 (1991), 305-324.
- The ancient legal sources of seventeenth century probability, in
S. Gaukroger, ed,
The Uses of Antiquity
(Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1991), 123-144.
- Mathematical necessity and reality,
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
67 (1989), 286-294. (Abstract)
- Homomorphisms between Verma modules in characteristic p,
Journal of Algebra
112 (1988), 58-85.
(Abstract)
- Non-deductive logic in mathematics,
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
38 (1987), 1-18.
- Are dispositions reducible to categorical properties?
Philosophical Quarterly
36 (1986), 84-86.
- Aristotle on species variation
Philosophy
61 (1986), 245-52.
- Natural sciences as textual interpretation: the hermeneutics of the natural sign
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (1984), 509-20.
- Mental furniture from the philosophers,
Et Cetera
40 (1983), 177-91.
- The Renaissance myth,
Quadrant
26 (11) (Nov, 1982), 51-60.
An interview:
Book Reviews
I spoke on Pascal's Wager on ABC-RN Philosopher's Zone on 12 Nov 2011 ... transcript
I spoke on Christianity in 21st century Australia on Dec 1 2010 ... flyer
I spoke on Australian philosophy at the Sydney Philosophy Forum, 27 Aug 2010 ... text
I discussed philosophy of mathematics on ABC Radio National's Philosopher's Zone, 15 May 2010.
I debated the virtue of prudence with Bob Carr and others on ABC Radio National's Spirit of Things program, 4 Apr 2010.
At the book launch of What Science Knows on 15 Dec 2009, I gave some thoughts on what to think about climate change.
I spoke at the Australian Catholic Students Association Conference, Brisbane, July 11 2009 on social justice
I spoke at Philoagora on June 16 2009 ... text ... version on Philosopher
's Zone, Radio National
I spoke at the Sydney Writers' Festival on May 22 2009 on Sydney philosophy ...
details ... text ... story
I spoke on temperance at Warrane College's Autumn Seminar, May 2 2009 ... details
On ABC Radio National Counterpoint, 6 Apr 2009, I discussed Maths and the financial crisis
I spoke on 'When science doesn't know' at the
Evidence, Science and Public Policy conference, Sydney University, on Mar 26 2009.
I debated 'Can atheists justify morality?' at UNSW, Mar 30 2009 ...
details
The Australian 23 July 2008 had a story on my work on an Australian Database of Indigenous Violence ... Christopher Pearson column.
I spoke on The Philosophy of Mathematics and Infinity to the Philoagora forum on July 22 2008.
I made a submission to the Review of Australian Higher Education, on the need for business to pay for the supply of graduates, especially via internships.
I made a submission to the 2008 Quarantine and Biosecurity Review.
I spoke on social justice on
Philosopher's Zone interview 1 Dec 2007... Counterpoint 26 Nov.
An Online Opinion piece, 'Social justice': Utopian fantasy or foundation of prosperity?
On Aug 18 2007 I discussed the worst arguments in philosophy on ABC Radio
National's Philosopher's Zone ... transcript.
On July 10 2007 I spoke on 'Australian philosophy - a distinctive tradition' at Philoagora.
My presentation on 'Happiness and restraint' to the Happiness and Its Causes Conference on 15 June was printed in The Australian's Higher Ed Supplement.
I spoke on 'Why be moral?' on ABC Radio National's Counterpoint on
Apr 2 ... transcript.
I gave a series of four lectures on the foundations of ethics
at the Aquinas Academy in March 2007 ... details... first lecture... 2nd... 3rd... 4th.
Interview with the UK Catholic Herald.
The book launch of Catholic Values and Australian
Realities was held on April 30 2006 ... an account.
A video
on Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
Letter in The Australian on the Business Council of Australia's
whinges about the skills of graduates.
On Radio National's Encounter, Mar 12 2006, I debated
postmodernism
and religion
I was awarded the 2005 Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics ... story
On Oct 3 2005 I was interviewed on RN Counterpoint on
restraint; see further on the restraint project.
I was interviewed on Radio National's Philosopher's Zone on
Relativism and Ratzinger on 27 Apr 2005.
I was "in conversation" with Rai Gaita and Jean Curthoys on Corrupting
the Youth at Gleebooks on July 7, 2004.
I debated Patricia Petersen on 'Is there anything wrong with pornography?'
at the
Philorum Philosophy Forum on June 2, 2004 ...
text.
I debated
God and Science
at the Blackheath Philosophy Forum Feb 7, 2004.
See also my collections of
Myths about the Middle Ages;
self-reference jokes;
my page on
School of Mathematics' alumni.
Some opinions on the direction of mathematics education
can be found at
Gazette Letter .
Something on the excitement of mathematics is at
ABC radio
talk, 'A mathematical mind'.
My day, 15 Apr 2005;
a profile.
I am the literary executor of the Australian philosopher
David Stove.
Thesis topics can include the philosophy of mathematics, the history of
ideas in probability and evidence, and the foundations of the logical
approach to probability.
Inquiries are welcome from students at PhD, Masters and
4th year honours level who have thesis proposals in
a range of areas connected with pattern recognition or the philosophy
of mathematics.
Students may be enrolled in either the
School of Mathematics or the Schools of Computer Science
and Engineering or Philosophy.
.
.