April 5th at 18:00, in F1.15
This talk will compare two different conceptualisations of domain expansion in mathematics, as exemplified by Kenneth Manders and, among others, Richard Dedekind, respectively. After presenting how Manders’ ideas relate to the common model-theoretic notions of existentially closed models and model completeness of theories, we argue that the framework yields problematic assessments of some paradigmatic examples of domain expansion. We then move on to the question of how these examples are handled in Dedekind’s framework, and then use the results of this analysis to assess the merits of Manders’ proposal.