David Charles McCarty (October 20, 1953 – November 25, 2020)

[Martin Davis]

Professor David Charles McCarty was born in Chicago, Illinois to Charles
Albert and Mary
Loretta McCarty. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from Iowa
State University, an
M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota, and the DPhil from
Oxford University in
1984, where he studied with Dana Scott. He began his career as an Assistant
Professor at Ohio
State in 1983, was a Joint University Lecturer at Edinburgh University from
1984 to 1987, an
Assistant Professor at Florida State from 1987 to 1990, and joined Indiana
University in 1991,
first on a visiting appointment and then as Associate Professor in 1995. He
was promoted to
Full Professor in 2003. He was the director of the IU Logic Program from
1996 to 2002 and the
director of the Cognitive Science Logic Certificate Program from 1996 to
2008. He was a
member of the Cognitive Science program and an adjunct professor in
Computer Science and in
History and Philosophy of Science. Professor McCarty held visiting
appointments at Konstanz as
a DAAD Research Fellow and a Senior Research Fellow at the Sidney M.
Edelstein Center for the
History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew
University of
Jerusalem. He was a Fellow at the Copernicus Center in Cracow, and
President of the Indiana
Philosophical Association 2012-13.
Professor McCarty’s primary fields of research were foundations of logic
and mathematics,
early analytic philosophy, and the history of mathematics and logic in the
late 19 th and early 20 th
centuries. He published over 120 peer-reviewed papers. He wrote on
intuitionism, the
completeness problem for intuitionistic logic, Markov’s Principle,
constructive validity,
realizability and recursive mathematics, potentially infinite sets,
denotational semantics,
Church’s Thesis, logical truth, the meanings of the connectives, limits of
mathematical
explanation, mathematical realism, structuralism, antirealism, the
philosophy of logical
atomism, as well as Hilbert and du Bois-Reymond, Carnap, Brouwer,
Helmholtz, Frege,
Wittgenstein, Dedekind, Gödel, Anselm’s ontological argument, Goethe,
historical fiction, the
pathetic fallacy, and other topics. His book To an Infinite Power:
Mathematical and
Philosophical Writings of Paul du Bois-Reymond will published by Oxford
University Press in
2021.
Professor McCarty had several main lines of work in logic.  He was one of
the world's leading
experts on constructive mathematics and intuitionistic logic, and all
matters related to their
history and philosophy.  He proved a number of results on these topics that
are of permanent
importance both to people in that field and to outsiders. For example, he
answered the
question of whether one can prove the completeness of intutionisitic logic
inside of
intuitionistic logic the way one can for classical logic; he showed that
this cannot be done. But
his work in logic should not be reduced to a list of technical results.
Rather, it was a decades-
long deep involvement on topics coming from the area of constructive
mathematics.   While he
did do technical work—lots of it—he always did so as part of philosophical
or foundational
explorations or arguments.
The topics of constructive mathematics and intuitionistic logic have always
had a special and
noteworthy relationship to the more mainstream views in logic and
philosophy of mathematics.
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