Formal Philosophy, a collection of interviews with 21 logicians and philosophers edited by Vincent Hendricks and John Symons is now available. The website contains a number of interesting excerpts. Interviews withJohan van Benthem, Brian F. Chellas, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Melvin Fitting, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Haim Gaifman, Clark Nøren Glymour, Adolf Grünbaum, Susan Haack, Sven Ove Hansson, Jaakko … Continue reading Formal Philosophy online

There will be a conference on (Anti-)Realisms, Logic and Metaphysics, at the University of Nancy, 28 June to 1 July 2006. The call for papers is here (deadline December 15, but they only want abstracts); for more information follow the links on the sidebar on the site. Speakers include Michael Lynch, Peter van Inwagen, Mathieu … Continue reading (Anti-)Realisms, Logic and Metaphysics

Yes, that would be nice if the Scientific American did a special issue on logic. But it's actually a special issue of Pour la Science, the French edition of the Scientific American. Pour la Science Dossier N° 49 (October 2005) is on "Les chemins de la logique". It looks really exciting, and I wish I … Continue reading Scientific American Special Issue on Logic

Georg Moser and I finally got our paper done for the Studia Logica special issue on cut elimination. It's on the complexity of the epsilon elimination procedure in the first epsilon theorem. (If you don't know what the epsilon theorem or the epsilon calculus is, see here.) It's a consequence of the cut-elimination theorem that … Continue reading New paper on the epsilon calculus

Via the PT list, I hear about a new open-access, online journal on computational logic, entitled Logical Methods in Computer Science. It's run by Dana Scott, Gordon Plotkin, Moshe Vardi, and Jirí Adamek. In addition to regular papers, they will publish special issuse, e.g., containing selected papers from LICS. Here's the email they sent advertising … Continue reading Logical Methods in Computer Science

If you're not on our mailing list: The Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary is pleased to announce aMinisymposium on LogicAll talks will take place in 1253 Social Sciences Building***Friday, November 4, 4:00 pmAlasdair UrquhartUniversity of TorontoThe UnnameableFrege has a puzzling doctrine that functions are unsaturated entities. This paper is devoted to an … Continue reading Logic Minisymposium with Burgess, Fine, and Urquhart

Via Varia, I see that the French-Canadian journal Philosophiques is actually freely avaliable online since 1999. There are some online issues that are interesting for the logic/history of analytic/philosophy of math crowd, e.g., the special issue on Bolzano edited by Sandra Lapointe, and the issue on Poincaré's epistemology (the latter includes a short piece by … Continue reading Philosophy of Math, in French

Just came across the OpenChoice program of Springer Verlag: Springer Open Choice gives you the power to choose how you want your research published. As an author-focused publishing company, Springer believes that authors should have the right to determine what publication model best meets their needs.Springer Open Choice is exactly what it says: a choice. … Continue reading Springer OpenChoice: Why?

Varia is a French blog on philosophy, including a sizeable section on logic run by Mickaël Simon. There I found a link to Vann McGee's online lectures for his Logic I course at MIT, on the OpenCourseWare server.M. Simon also pointed me to Théorème, a group blog run by a bunch of people from Paris … Continue reading Deux carnets Web sur la philosophie et la logique

Skip this if you're not interested in techie stuff; we'll return to our regularly scheduled logic programming soon.Yesterday I got some fancy new equipment: A Dell Optiplex GX620 desktop, with a stunning Dell 2405FPW 24" screen. Then I was lucky enough to find a North American mirror which already had the brand-new SUSE Linux 10.0, … Continue reading Geek News: SUSE Linux 10.0 on a Dell Optiplex GX620

Two greats of German logic turned 60 not too long ago: Helmut Schwichtenberg in 2002 and Wolfram Pohlers in 2003. Both had birthday conferences held in their honor, and the proceedings thereof appear in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic this year, the Schwichtenberg Festschrift in the May and the Pohlers Festschrift in the … Continue reading Schwichtenberg and Pohlers Festschriften

We're looking for an epistemologist: The Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor. The position will commence, subject to budgetary approval, on July 1, 2006. A PhD or equivalent, and a strong research and teaching record are required.The area of specialization for … Continue reading Epistemology Job at Calgary

This is scary. Apparently someone in the next building over received a mystery envelope containing a white powder. When I got to campus there were police and hazmat people all over the place: At 11:30 a.m. today the Bio Sciences building was evacuated as a precaution due to a concern involving an envelope sent to … Continue reading Scary

If you're reading this on September 19, please click here (courtesy of Samir). It's Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arr!

Since Greg asked, I thought I'd give a brief survey of many-sided sequent calculi. The basic idea is simple and quite old (the first paper on it, by Kurt Schröter, is from 1955 [8]; the most detailed early papers is [6]). In the standard semantics for classical sequents, Γ ⇒ Δ means that either one … Continue reading Many-sided Sequent Calculi and Many-valued Logics

I know chances are that you'll be nowhere near southern Alberta in the next several months, but if you are, check out our series of talks. The logic/language highlights this term are Gillian Russell on October 14 on "Truth in virtue of meaning" and a 2-day mini-symposium on logic featuring John Burgess, Kit Fine, and … Continue reading Our Colloquium Series Rocks!

The most recent issue of The Journal of Symbolic Logic contains the long-awaited (well, by me) article on "On mathematical instrumentalism" by Patrick Caldon and Aleks Ignjatović. It presents the results from Chapters 2 and 3 of Aleks's excellent 1990 Berkeley PhD thesis. Here is the abstract: In this paper we devise some technical tools … Continue reading Caldon and Ignjatović on Mathematical Instrumentalism

The October issue of Synthese, edited by Bernd Buldt, Volker Halbach, and Reinhard Kahle, contains a bunch of exciting papers on Frege and Hilbert: Amending Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, by Fernando Ferreira Real numbers and set theory – Extending the Neo-Fregean Programme Beyond Arithmetic, by Bob Hale Frege’s permutation argument revisited , by Kai Wehmeier … Continue reading Synthese special issue on Frege and Hilbert

Every once in a while, I get asked by students with a background in math (usually with an interest in logic) what they should do if they want to get into grad school in philosophy. I know there's quite a number of accomplished philosophers who started out as math majors and then went on to … Continue reading From Math to Philosophy

I put up a revised and expanded version of my survey of Hilbert's Program up on arXiv. If you have comments, you could post them here. You know, try out the whole blogging-revolutionizing-scholarly-communication-etc. thing.