Department of Philosophy

Sharon Berry has eclectic research interests, but most of her work focuses on epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics. 

Within philosophy of mathematics, she’s particularly interested in the access problem (does accepting human knowledge of mathematics commit us to some kind of spooky coincidence?), the relationship between mathematics and logic, a priori applications of mathematics, and the philosophy of set theory.

She’s also interested in how ideas from philosophy of mathematics can illuminate the foundations of a priori knowledge, metametaphysics (particularly debates about realism and knowledge by convention) and access problems in other areas, like ethics.

She recently published a book  A Logical Foundation for Potentialist Set Theory (2022) with Cambridge University Press. Her papers on the above topics have appeared in journals like Philosophical Studies, Analysis and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.