James Franklin

The death of a person is a tragedy while the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is a mere firework. The moral difference is grounded in the nature of humans: humans have intrinsic worth, a worth that makes their fate really matter. This is the worth that the Australian philosopher James Franklin proposes as the foundation of ethics. In The Worth...

This open access book covers four decades of work by the leading Australian philosopher, mathematician, and historian of ideas, James Franklin. These interlinking essays are connected by a core theme: the necessary structures in reality that allow certain knowledge of absolute truths. Franklin’s Aristotelian realist philosophy of mathematics shows how mathematical truths are directly about physical reality, and at the...