Current position(s)

Professor Emeritus (retired)
James Madison University
Harrisonburg VA 22807

Current project(s)

Working on a metaphysics book, based to start with on a kind of naive set theory, although not merely on mathematics or logic (e.g., philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, ontology in general)

Former position(s)

Senior Lecturer, Mathematics and History and Philosophy of Science, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; later, same at University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealad; post-doctoral fellow, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Monographs (and dissertation)

My Ph D dissertation was on topology, entitled "On the group of all homeomorphisms of a manifold", published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society (v 97, 1960, p 193-212). The main result was presented in 1985 in a book called Knots by Gerhard Burde and Heiner Zieschang under the name "Fisher's theorem".
Other publications: "Cauchy and the Infinitely Small", Historia Mathematica, v 5, 1978, p 313-331. "Cauchy's Variables and Orders of the Infinitely Small", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, v 30, 1979, pp. 261-265. "The Infinite and Infinitesimal Quantities of du Bois-Reymond and their Reception:, Archive for History of Exact Sciences, v 24, 1981, p 101-164. Article called "Veronese's non-archimedean linear continuum", p 107-145 in a book edited by Paul Ehrlich called Real Numbers, Generalizations of the Reals, and Theories of Continua, 1997 . Also published in various places: an article on the structure of Euclid's Elements, a study of Joseph Priestley, a critique of E. Wilson's sociobiology, and a study of Sir Arthur Keith's role in the Piltdown fraud. Also have reviewed many articles for the Mathematical Reviews, chiefly of works in history and foundations of mathematics, written in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.
Added 18 Jun 2002: I have now published a number of pieces on my website at http://gfisher.org, including a book length manuscript called Marriage and Divorce of Astronomy and Astrology, a couple of pieces related to the Holocaust, some poems, etc.

Articles

On my website at http://gfisher.org: Some genealogical articles, some philosophical articles (Heidegger, Carnap), a work on US Civil War, etc.

Edited volumes

Mathematics, Philosophy, History of Science