Byeong-Uk Yi

Prof Byeong-Uk Yi is a philosopher at the University of Toronto who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of language, logic and philosophy of mathematics. He was born in South Korea, and studied philosophy at Seoul National University before moving to the US for graduate study in 1987. He studied in the Department of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Department of Philosophy at UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1995. Then he held academic appointments in the University of Alberta, University of Queensland, University of Glasgow, and University of Minnesota before joining the University of Toronto, where he is presently Associate Professor of Philosophy. His recent work focuses on the nature of the many as such, and the logic and meaning of expressions used to talk about them, such as plural constructions found in English and many other natural languages. He also work on the nature of stuff, semantics of mass nouns, semantics of classifiers of East Asian languages (e.g., Korean, Chinese, Japanese), and some issues in philosophy of science, decision theory, and history of philosophy. He published a book, Understanding the Many (Routledge, 2002), and many articles in international academic journals in philosophy and logic, and am working on a book on plural constructions, Plurals: Their Logic and Semantics. The awards he have received include I. W. Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta (1996-7), University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (1998-9), McKnight Land-grant Professorship (2003-5), and American Council of Learned Society Fellowship (2008-9). He used to spend quite some time playing go, an ancient board game similar to chess and popular in East Asian countries, but have not managed to do so recently.