Conversation with Pieranna Garavaso

Pieranna Garavaso is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Her research areas include epistemological and metaphysical issues in the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, personal identity, and feminist epistemologies. She received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Nebraska Lincoln in 1985. She has published Filosofia della matematica. Numeri e strutture (Guerini 1998), Filosofia delle donne (Laterza 2007, coauthored with N. Vassallo), and Frege on Thinking and its Epistemic Significance (Lexington Books 2014, coauthored with N. Vassallo). She edited Philip Hugly and Charles Sayward, Arithmetic and Ontology: A Non-Realist Philosophy of Mathematics (Rodopi 2006), a monographic issue of Paradigmi devoted to Contemporary Perspectives on Frege (2013), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism (Bloomsbury 2018). She has published articles in English and Italian journals and in edited collections. The University of Minnesota has recognized her teaching and research with three awards: the University of Minnesota, Morris Alumni Association Teaching Award in 2003, the Horace T. Morse University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Undergraduate Education in 2004, and the University of Minnesota Morris Faculty Distinguished Research Award in 2017. In this interview, she explains what led her to leave Italy in the early 1980’s to study philosophy in the US. She also illustrates how her ontological anti-realism in the philosophy of mathematics has influenced her work in feminist epistemology and metaphysics. She defends analytic philosophy from the accusation of being less friendly than continental philosophy towards feminist philosophy.