Wow, it's just raining Gödel references. The latest issue of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic is all about Gödel, with exciting-sounding titles like "Future tasks for Gödel scholars" (John W. Dawson, Jr. and Cheryl A. Dawson), "On Gödel's way in: the influence of Rudolf Carnap" (Warren Goldfarb), and "Gödel's reformulation of Gentzen's first consistency proof … Continue reading More on Gödel in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic

If you happen to be in or near Vienna, there's a little workshop at the TU Wien, Monday to Wednesday of next week, sponsored by the Gödel Society. It's on cut-elimination; speakers include Lev Beklemishev, Ale Carbone, Grigori Mints, Pavel Pudlák, and Helmut Schwichtenberg as well as a bunch of up-and-coming young logicians like Arnold … Continue reading Collegium Logicum 2005: Cut Elimination

Don't you wish someone would write a book that catalogs all the various ways in which one can misstate, misunderstand, and misapply Gödel's theorems, and how to correct such misunderstandings? A book that you can send your students off to read when they say stuff like, "Gödel showed that there is no mathematical truth," or … Continue reading Franzén on Use and Abuse of Gödel’s Theorem

Christos Papadimitriou has a novel called Turing (A Novel About Computation). (He also has a few other excellent textbooks on technical stuff, but y'all know that.) I didn't know about the novel before, and so when I went to the MIT Press website, I noticed that it's on sale! Only 9 bucks (US) for the … Continue reading Papadimitriou’s Turing (A Novel about Computation)

I'm re-reading Coffa's The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap in preparation for my course on the Vienna Circle, and was struck by this quote on p. 14: With his characteristic blend of genius and insanity, Leibniz had conceived of a project in which the simple constituents of concepts would be represented by prime numbers … Continue reading Gödel and Leibniz

Well, I spent the last 2 weeks finishing a paper and cleaning house, and now I'm in Vienna and jetlagged. But I got all my library cards in order and checked out some books. Now all I need is some sleep, setting up some kind of internet access at home, and I'll be back to … Continue reading Jetlag

There's a link on OPP to Chris Pincock's new paper A Role for Mathematics in the Physical Sciences (forthcoming in Nous), so I thought I'd draw everyone's attention (well, the attention of the handful of people reading this) to Chris's other work, all very good, available on his website.

Yarden Katz emailed me this query, which I unfortunately don't have time right now to think about. Please, someone help him out by posting a comment! I was reading Graham Priest's account of intuitionist logic (in Intro to Non-Classical Logics), where he gives a possible world semantics for several intuitionist logics. In addition to few … Continue reading Non-monotonic intuitionist logic?

Peter Smith writes: Just in time for its first birthday, I've updated the LaTeX for Logicians site. Maybe the title is getting rather misleading, as there is stuff there that may well be of interest to many philosophers and assorted other TeXies too! (My sense is that more and more philosophy grad students are picking … Continue reading LaTeX for Logicians updated

Philip Ebert reports that a formula editor for Begriffsschrift notation with output in XML and LaTeX begriff.sty format is available on the Arché Wiki.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has posted a list of new Standard Research Grants for 2005. The success rate for philosophy grants was 38%, down from 48% last year, with applications only increasing slightly (96 vs. 92 last year). The funding rate went down from 46% last year to 25% this … Continue reading SSHRC Grants in Philosophy for 2005