Erich Reck's entry on Richard Dedekind in the SEP is now online. I'm particularly happy about this one: It's time Dedekind gets some of the attention for his philosophy of math that Frege's been getting for his, and Erich's entry as well as his other work, I hope, will help bring that about. While many … Continue reading Reck on Dedekind

Two more new entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of interest to logicians:The Development of Proof Theory by Jan von Plato and Non-wellfounded Set Theory by Larry Moss.From Jan's entry I see that his translation of the interesting third chapter of Genzen's thesis--wherein Gentzen proved normalization of natural deduction derivations--is out in the next issue of … Continue reading More SEP Entries

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There's a very laudable enterprise: Blogging on Pseudoscience (at BPSDB.org) aggregates blog posts debunking or pointing out pseudo-scientific nonsense such as Intelligent Design. Lots of good stuff, PZ Meyers is part of it, etc. But, look at the logo they use:Yes, that's a sequent calculus for linear logic. I know Girard has an idiosyncratic style, … Continue reading Linear Logic is Pseudoscience?

New SEP entry on Definitions by Anil Gupta.

Paolo's Stanford Encyclopedia entry on explanation in mathematics is online.

Ok, that was faster than I expected: The winners of the Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Fellowships have been announced. They are: Pre-doctoral category David Fernández Duque (Stanford): Non-deterministic semantics for dynamic topological logicPavel Hrubeš (Czech Academy of Sciences): On lengths of proofs in non-classical logics Post-doctoral category Andrey Bovykin (Steklov/Liverpool): Independence results in concrete mathematicsPeter … Continue reading Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Fellowship Winners

Hi, I promise to post something logic-related very soon. In the meantime, please enjoy this funny video:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4&hl=en]Please look in the mirror before you open your car door!

Shawn at Words and Other Things asks about good books on philosophy of logic. If you have suggestions, comment there, please.

Nice! Andrej Bauer has implemented the Hydra Game in a Java applet. The Hydra Game, like Goodstein sequences, is a way of coding ordinals ≤ ε0 ... hence they provide independence results from Peano Arithmetic. Andrej has all the deets. (A Java applet for Goodstein sequences is here.)

The finalists for the Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Prizes have been announced. They are: Pre-doctoral category David Fernández: Non-Deterministic Semantics for Dynamic Topological LogicEkaterina Fokina: Index Sets for Some Classes of StructuresPavel Hrubes: On lengths of proofs in non-classical logicsMaryanthe Malliaris: Realization of phi-types and Keisler's orderKentaro Sato: The Strength of Extensionality - Weak Weak … Continue reading Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Prize Finalists

John Burgess has a draft of a book on Philosophical Logic up on his website. It focusses on logics with direct philosophical relevance. It starts with temporal and modal logic, deals with conditional logics, "relevantistic" logics, and intuitionistic logic. It will be a relatively slim volume, but there's still a lot of interest in here: … Continue reading John Burgess, Philosophical Logic

Mike Kaspari of Getting things done in academia has a useful checklist of things to do before you send off a paper. It talks about "data", "results", and "controls", but it mostly applies to logic or philosophy as well. Mike asks for input on what else one should do. (HT: Semantics etc.)

New SEP entry by Herb Enderton on "Second-order and Higher-order Logic".

Tim Chow has posted a new version of his "Beginner's guide to forcing" (previously announced here) on arXiv, and points to other introductions to forcing: one by Kenny Easwaran, who's also posted his "Cheerful introduction to forcing and the continuum hypothesis" on arXiv, and one by Peter Johnson, "Foundations for abstract forcing." I'm guessing the … Continue reading More Introductions to Forcing

CALL FOR PAPERS31st International Wittgenstein Symposium 2008 onReduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the SciencesKirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, 10-16 August 2008http://www.alws.at/ INVITED SPEAKERSWilliam Bechtel, Ansgar Beckermann, Johan van Benthem, Alexander Bird, Elke Brendel, Otavio Bueno, John P. Burgess, David Chalmers, Igor Douven, Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth Gemes, Volker Halbach, Stephan Hartmann, Alison Hills, Leon … Continue reading Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

The ASL Newsletter came in the mail today, so if you're a member, you should be getting yours about now as well. For the first time in a long while, the election to the ASL council is contested. I'm not going to ask you to vote for me, but you should vote!

From Tim Chow via FOM: I have just completed a first draft of an expository paper on forcing. http://alum.mit.edu/www/tchow/forcing.pdfThis paper grew out of a sci.math.research article that I posted back in 2001 entitled "Forcing for dummies": http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.research/msg/c2d65d1a23eabb66I made a major change, hopefully for the better, by approaching the subject via Boolean-valued models, which I believe … Continue reading A Beginner’s Guide to Forcing

I'm on sabbatical next term, and am off to Europe in one week--and it looks like that's not a day too soon. Teaching modal logic and history of analytic this term was a lot of fun, but I look forward to getting writing done. Don't have much planned yet, but I'll be in Toulouse for … Continue reading Sabbatical in one week!

A year and a half ago, Andy Arana and I organized a session at the Pacific APA about logic and philosophy graduate education. One of the panelists was Ted Sider, who spoke about what kinds of logic he thought a philosophy grad student should know. He's been teaching a course on exactly that, i.e., a … Continue reading Ted Sider: Logic for Philosophy