table.lines td { vertical-align: top; border: 1px dashed gray; empty-cells: show; padding: 2pxWith the kind permission of Brian Leiter, here's a breakout of the Canadian philosophy departments by specialty according to the Philosophical Gourmet Report 2006-08. The same programs are ranked in 2006-08 as in the 2004-06 edition. This year, only the rank ordering of … Continue reading Canadian PhD programs in the 2006-08 PGR

I just spent a wonderful week in Kyoto at the invitation of Susumu Hayashi. Susumu's been working on Hilbert's notebooks, and he, Mariko Yasugi, Wilfried Sieg, Koji Nagatogawa, and I have had several days of interesting discussions about them. The last two days there was a workshop on Hilbert and computability, and it was a … Continue reading Hilbert in Kyoto

Julian Henkin sent me the link to Berkeley's obituary of Leon Henkin.

I just heard that Leon Henkin passed away earlier this week. He was a terrific logician and a terrific teacher. He will be missed.

Ok, this is hopefully my last paper ever on many-valued logics. Well, maybe not. In any case, it's done and will come out in APAL.

In an interesting thread titled "Recursive" on FOM last week there was a discussion on the history of primitive recursive functions. Of course, already Grassmann, Dedekind, and Peano gave primitive recursive definitions of individual functions such as addition and multiplication, and Skolem's 1923 article

I was asked in email about a good source about Goodstein sequences and the independence of Goodstein's Theorem from Peano Arithmetic. The independence result is due to Kirby and Paris in a 1983 paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (vol. 14), using the method of indicators. Georg Moser suggested the following paper … Continue reading Independence of Goodstein’s Theorem from PA

I'm going to be teaching philosophy of language next term. It's the first time--if you can believe that--we're offering a course with that title. We used to have a course called "Analytical Philosophy", which served that purpose, but it was also a history of analytic philosophy course. Anyway. I'd like to give my students a … Continue reading Philosophy of Language Texts?

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has posted a list of new Standard Research Grants for 2006. This year's stats: 85 applications (2005: 96, 2004: 92), 32 grants, for a success rate of 37% (2005: 38%, 2004: 48%). This year, new scholars (≤ 5 years beyond PhD) had a 29% success rate … Continue reading SSHRC Grants in Philosophy for 2006

Martin Löb has passed away on August 28. Obituary here.

In Prague this past week, David Miller gave a talk in which (among many other interesting things) he distinguished two notions of logical independence. One he credits to Moore (the mathematician, not the philosopher) and Wittgenstein, and that's the notion of independence at work when we say, e.g., that an axiom system is independent. A … Continue reading Notions of Logical Independence

I am very sorry. There will be more logic blogging very soon, I promise. I'm off to Prague for the Vagueness and Uncertainty workshop, and if the Academy of Sciences also has internet access in the villa they're putting me up in, I will liveblog it. Rosanna Keefe! Stewart Shapiro (who has a new book, … Continue reading Dear Matt

The Austrian newspaper Der Standard, of all things, reminded me of another centenary: Nelson Goodman would have turned 100 today.

PhD Student Position in Logic and Cognitive Science, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol (UK):A newly established research group headed by Hannes Leitgeb at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, has an open position for a PhD student. The group, which will be part of an international EUROCORES Collaborative Research Project on Metacognition, will … Continue reading PhD Student Position in Logic at Bristol

Peter Smith's book on incompleteness is now online in a new version.

Ever tried reading logical texts from the 20s or before (e.g., C. I. Lewis's Symbolic Logic)? Confused by the absence of parentheses and all the dots and colons? Here's Carnap's explanation of the notation (from Abriss der Logistik): 4 c. The Dot RulesThe dot symbols (. : :. :: etc.) replace the bracketing of propositions. … Continue reading Dots as Brackets in Formulas

50 years ago this summer, McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon organized a summer conference at Dartmouth which turned out to be a milestone in Artificial Intelligence research. For the logically minded, this item in the funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation is perhaps most interesting: 4. Theory of the Size of a Calculation If we … Continue reading Dartmouth AI Conference 50 Years Ago

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Computability in Europe conference in the lovely seaside town of Swansea, Wales. Lots of interesting talks on all kinds of aspects of computation, including a number of talks on the (limits of) hypercomputation, a tutorial on proof complexity by Sam Buss, and special sessions on Gödel's … Continue reading Computability in Swansea

Reading over my previous post, I was wondering if a group of scholars can be referred to as a "gaggle". So I did some research (i.e., I asked google) and happened upon this wiki page, which lists the appropriate collective noun for logicians as "sequitur", and attributes this to Bertrand Russell. Anyone got a reference … Continue reading A Sequitur of Logicians?