Aldo G. Antonelli

Aldo Antonelli, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, passed away suddenly on October 11, 2015 while bicycling in Sacramento, Ca. At the time of his death, he was 53 years old.

Prof. Antonelli was a leading scholar in areas of pure and applied logic, the philosophy of logic and the history of early analytic philosophy. In logic, his research focused on issues in defeasible reasoning and non-monotonic logic. His more recent work in philosophy of logic was concerned with applications of generalized quantifier theory and abstraction principles to the foundations of arithmetic in the more general context of Fregean foundations. His contributions to Frege scholarship, in collaboration with his departmental colleague Robert May, explored Fregean foundations for arithmetic and Fregean metalogic. All of Prof. Antonelli's work has been highly influential; it is known for the depth of its ideas, for the clarity of their presentation, and for the precision and rigor of their development.

Prof. Antonelli received his undergraduate education from the Università di Torino and his Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Pittsburgh. He taught at Pittsburgh, Yale, Stanford and Michigan State, before joining the University of California, first at Irvine in 1998, where he was a member of the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and then moving to Davis in 2008. Prof. Antonelli was a member of the Association for Symbolic Logic, the American Philosophical Association, the Philosophy of Mathematics Association, and the Society for Exact Philosophy. He served as coordinating editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic and the Review of Symbolic Logic. At the time of his passing, he was the chair of UC Davis Academic Senate Committee on Faculty Welfare, and a member of the system-wide University Committee on Faculty Welfare.

Together with Prof. Elaine Landry, his partner and colleague, Prof. Antonelli established philosophy of logic and mathematics as a focal point of scholarship in the Davis philosophy department. Aldo's spirit, his intellectual focus and his sense of humor were integral to the life of the department. He is deeply missed by Elaine and his family, by his friends and colleagues in the department and the university, and by the broader academic community of logic and philosophy to which Aldo was such an important and eminent contributor.

Prof. Antonelli is survived by his partner, Prof. Landry, his sons Federico and Riccardo, their mother Giovanna Fogli, and his brother David.

His Erdös number was 4.