My colleague and friend Maggie Osler died yesterday.  She was a wonderful person, and an admirable scholar of early modern science and natural philosophy, the Scientific Revolution, and especially on Boyle, Descartes, Gassendi, and Newton. Her 1994 book Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy is a standard. And I look forward to reading her last … Continue reading Margaret J. Osler, 1942-2010

If you're here for the philosophy you might not have heard: a few days ago, Vinay Deolalikar of HP Labs has posted a draft paper containing a serious attempt to prove that P ? NP, one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Problems.  The math/theory scene is all aflutter over it. This wiki page collects … Continue reading Serious Contender for Proof that P ≠ NP

The Institute Vienna Circle is hosting a workshop on Carnap next week, June 28 and 29.  The program is here.

These two Assistant Professorships in philosophy have just been advertised at LMU Munich (see below). The deadline for applications is July 2nd, 2010. (German language skills are not mandatory.) Soon also several postdoctoral and doctoral positions in philosophy (at the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) will also be advertised. (1) Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich is seeking … Continue reading Two Assistant Professorships in Logic at Hannes Leitgeb’s Group in Munich

Two months ago, Blogger turned off FTP publishing on blogs, which meant I couldn't update LogBlog anymore.  It's taken a while, but the blog has now moved.  Well, I managed to import all the old posts into Drupal, the CMS we use at the University of Calgary and which generates the rest of my site.  … Continue reading LogBlog Has Moved!

Here are my slides from my PM@100 talk.

Just up on the SEP, by Yaroslav Shramko and Heinrich Wansing, an entry on truth values.

Just up on the SEP, by Yaroslav Shramko and Heinrich Wansing, an entry on truth values.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!Rózsa Péter (1905-1977) was a Hungarian mathematician and early contributor to the theory of (primitive) recursive functions. She received her PhD in 1935 from (what is now) Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Her fellow student Laszlo Kálmár had introduced her a few years earlier to the then brand-new work of Gödel, and … Continue reading Rózsa Péter

If you have access to Oxford Scholarship Online, you can now read Mancosu's excellent collection The Philosophy of Mathematical Practice via the internets. Contemporary philosophy of mathematics offers us an embarrassment of riches. But anyone familiar with this area will be aware of the need for new approaches that will pay closer attention to mathematical … Continue reading Philosophy of Mathematical Practice Online

Robin Milner died on March 20. He was a leading theoretical computer scientist who developed the LCF theorem prover, the ML programming language, and introduced the π-calculus. He was founding director of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh and then Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge. Milner was a … Continue reading Robin Milner, 1934-2010

From today's mini-AIR: The Oscillating Humans Project, announced here, is searching for a living specimen - an exemplar - of an oscillating human.DEFINITION: For purposes of the project, an Oscillating Human is someone who consistently, repeatedly, over many years, expresses opinions directly opposite to opinions he or she expressed earlier, always ignoring and/or denying the … Continue reading People Who Oscillate

From Abstruse Goose:

Sorry for the long silence...You may have heard by now, but in case you haven't: The Group in Logic, Language, and Information at King's College is threatened by "budget cuts": looks like the administration is just willfully destroying it by firing several faculty.Information and links to protest sites etc. given here.

Leila Haapaaranta's collection The Development of Modern Logic came out earlier this year. It's a handy one-volume compendium to the history of logic in the modern era (full disclosure: I have an article in it). The price tag might still be a bit steep: $150, although that buys you over 1,000 pages of scholarship in … Continue reading The Development of Modern Logic Online

Last May, Ohio State had a conference in honor of Harvey Friedman's 60th birthday. Videos of the talks are now available (via Neil Tennant). These include talks by Friedman himself, as well as John Burgess, Sam Buss, Mic Detlefsen, Sol Feferman, Hartry Field, Rohit Parikh, Grisha Mints, Wilfried Sieg, Ted Slaman, Patrick Suppes, and many … Continue reading Videos from Foundational Adventures Conference

Today on Dinosaur Comics:

From the ASL Newsletter, I just learned that Per Lindström died two months ago: Per (Pelle) Lindström, the Swedish logician, died in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 21, 2009, after a short period of illness. He was born on April 9, 1936, and spent most of his academic life at the Department of Philosophy, University of … Continue reading Per Lindström, 1936-2009

New book out from Princeton UP on the Graduate Education Initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, discussed on Inside Higher Ed. Not sure if any philosophy departments participated. In light of previous discussion on differential attrition rates for women in the pipeline, this should be interesting: Chapter 7 addresses a matter of continuing concern … Continue reading Reforming Graduate Education

Following up on my previous post, Women in the Academic Pipeline, where I compared rates at which women earned BAs and PhDs in various fields in the US: what does it look like in the faculty ranks? Not surprisingly, the percentages in general go down as you go higher, but there are some interesting (and … Continue reading Women in the Academic Pipeline II