Philosophy of Computer Science

The philosophy of computer science is concerned with those philosophical issues that arise from within the academic discipline of computer science. It is intended to be the philosophical endeavor that stands to computer science as philosophy of mathematics does to mathematics and philosophy of technology does to technology.

Indeed, the abstract nature of computer science, coupled with its technological ambitions, ensures that many of the conceptual questions that arise in the philosophies of mathematics and technology have computational analogues. In addition, the subject will draw in variants of some of the central questions in the philosophies of mind, language and science. We shall concentrate on a tightly related group of topics which form the spine of the subject. These include specification, implementation, semantics, programs, programming, correctness, abstraction and computation.