Fabian Pregel

Career Development Fellow in Philosophy at Christ Church, University of Oxford

Welcome to my website! I am a Career Development Fellow in Philosophy at Christ Church, University of Oxford. At Christ Church, I am also the Director of Studies for the undergraduate degrees Mathematics & Philosophy, Computer Science & Philosophy and Psychology, Philosophy & Linguistics.

I did a DPhil (that is, PhD) in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where I worked under the supervision of Prof Alexander Paseau, Prof Volker Halbach and Dr Wesley Wrigley on a thesis titled 'Neo-Logicism and Gödelian Incompleteness'.

Before academia, I spent many years at Goldman Sachs in London as a startup investor, and before that as a credit structurer. I am always happy to chat about life in finance and start-up pitches, so just speak to me.

Research Interests

My research is situated at the intersection of logic with adjacent disciplines such as philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, epistemology and computer science. I believe many questions of philosophical interest arise here.

Publications

2023

‘Reply to Sprenger’s “A Novel Solution to the Problem of Old Evidence”’. Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2023.92.

‘Neo-Logicism and Gödelian Incompleteness’. Mind 131 (524): 1055–82. Winning entry for the Mind Graduate Essay Prize. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac044.

‘Deductivism in the Philosophy of Mathematics’ (with Alexander Paseau). In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deductivism-mathematics/.

Teaching

Lectures

In Trinity Term 2023, I taught a series of lectures on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, their proof and their philosophical implications at Oxford’s philosophy faculty. The slides are available here.

Tutorials & Classes

Over the last few years, I have also taught classes and tutorials in logic and adjacent areas at Oxford’s philosophy and mathematics faculty.

Classes / Tutorials I regularly teach:

Introductory Logic (1st year course)
Philosophical Logic (3rd year course)
Philosophy of Mathematics (3rd year course)
Philosophy of Language and Logic (3rd year course)
Knowledge & Reality (Epistemology and Metaphysics) (3rd year course)
Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic (1st year course)
Turing on Computability and Intelligence (1st year course)
Philosophy of Science (3rd year course)

Summer Academy on 'Debt'

Over the course of July 2023, Lucy Duggan and I volunteered to teach a two-and-a-half-week interdisciplinary course on ‘Debt’ at the German Pupils Academy (Deutsche Schülerakademie, DSA). The German Pupils Academy is funded by the German government and has been running for over thirty years to bring together Germany’s most talented pupils and have academics challenge them intellectually.

Our course looked at debt from a financial, ethical, historical and literary perspective. The course received some coverage, for example here and here.

I'm always keen to learn more about those topics, so please reach out if they are of interest to you.