Hartry H. Field was born in Boston. He received his BA in Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin (1967) and his Ph.D. at Harvard (1972) working under Hilary Putnam and Richard Boyd. He has taught at Princeton, USC, CUNY Graduate Center, and NYU, where he is currently Silver Professor of Philosophy. Field is the recipient of, among other awards, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1979–1980) and the Lakatos prize (1986) for his book Science without Numbers (1980). He was elected in 2003 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Field has made significant contributions in a number of areas. He is best known for his work in philosophy of mathematics and on a variety of issues connected with realism and with the notion of truth. In philosophy of mathematics, Field has defended a version of fictionalism: a view according to which mathematics, which he takes at face value as...