The book symposium I organized for this year's Pacific APA on Greg Frost-Arnold's Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard: Conversations of Logic, Mathematics, and Science (Chicago: Open Court, 2013) is coming out in the journal Metascience. The papers are now online: Rick Creath, Understandability Gary Ebbs, Quine’s “predilection” for finitism Greg Lavers, Carnap’s surprising views … Continue reading Book Symposium on Greg Frost-Arnold’s “Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard” in Metascience
Aldo Antonelli unexpectedly died two days ago, and I can't write about that without crying yet. Meanwhile, I recommend this beautiful paper to you: On the General Interpretation of First-Order Quantifiers, published in the ASL journal he founded, the Review of Symbolic Logic.
I know you've been waiting for the definitive assessment of what Carnap was up to in his unpublished Untersuchungen zur Allgemeinen Axiomatik from the late 1920s. Georg Schiemer, Erich Reck, and I wrote a paper about it. I'll leave it to you to judge whether this paper is the definitive assessment you've been waiting for. … Continue reading Carnap’s Early Metatheory
I've put the source code for my Logic 1 lecture slides into GitHub. That's a pretty standard intro logic course, using Language, Proof & Logic as a text. I do have mainly computer science students in the course, and I try to make the material relevant to them as much as possible. There are also … Continue reading Intro Logic Lecture Slides
Georg Schiemer, Richard Zach, and Erich Reck. 2017. "Carnap's Early Metatheory: Scope and Limits," Synthese 194(1), 33–65 In his Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik (1928) and Abriss der Logistik (1929), Rudolf Carnap attempted to formulate the metatheory of axiomatic theories within a single, fully interpreted type-theoretic framework and to investigate a number of meta-logical notions in … Continue reading Carnap’s early metatheory: Scope and limits
At the 2014 Pacific APA I organized a book symposium (aka, author-meets-critics) on Patricia Blanchette's Frege's Conception of Logic (OUP 2012). The contributions by Roy Cook, Marcus Rossberg, and Kai Wehmeier have just been published in the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy, together with Paddy's replies.
John T. Baldwin (Illinois-Chicago) has a draft of his book Formalism without Foundationalism: Model Theory and the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice. On, FOM he wrote: Martin Davis posted a couple of days ago a message containing this sentence. "Gödel showed us that the wild infinite could not really be separated from the tame mathematical world where … Continue reading John Baldwin on Model Theory and the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice
Nicole and I have openings, through a Canadian agency called MITACS, for advanced undergraduate students with a background in logic, philosophy, or computer science from Australia, Brazil, France, China, India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, or Vietnam to come to Calgary for 12 weeks over the northern summer of 2016 (i.e. May-Aug). There are two openings, … Continue reading Paid Undergraduate Internships with the Open Logic Project in Calgary, Summer 2016
The AAP reports on facebook that Jaakko Hintikka has died. Update: confirmed by the University of Helsinki. Update 2 from the CLMPS organizing committee in Helsinki: It is my sad duty to tell the news that the Finnish logician and philosopher Jaakko Hintikka died at the age of 86 after a brief illness on August … Continue reading Jaakko Hintikka, 1929-2015
If you want to print the "Git for philosophers" piece, I made a release of the Git version with PDF and HTML versions. Here's the PDF of Git for philosophers.
Paolo Mancosu's and my paper on Heinrich Behmann's 1921 lecture on the decision problem is out in the new issue of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. (Hey you are a member of the Association for Symbolic Logic, right? Comes with subscriptions to the Bulletin, the Review, and the Journal of Symbolic Logic!) This is the … Continue reading Behmann’s 1921 Lecture on the Decision Problem
First I just thought, "How weird! Applying many-valued logic to slime moulds." But then I read it and not only is this a bona-fide application of p-adic logic to the behavior of slime moulds, no, the slime moulds are used as computers in this application! And my own work is used! So, yay to p-adic … Continue reading Many-Valued Logics and Slime Moulds
Paolo Mancosu and Richard Zach. "Heinrich Behmann's 1921 lecture on the decision problem and the algebra of logic," Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 21 (2015), 164–187 Heinrich Behmann (1891–1970) obtained his Habilitation under David Hilbert in Göttingen in 1921 with a thesis on the decision problem. In his thesis, he solved—independently of Löwenheim and Skolem’s earlier … Continue reading Heinrich Behmann’s 1921 lecture on the decision problem and the algebra of logic
The long awaited (by me, at least) article by Paolo Mancosu on the Good Company objection has been out in the Review for a few months and I missed it. You probably didn't, if you care about these things, but anyway: In a recent article (Mancosu, 2009), I have explored the historical, mathematical, and philosophical … Continue reading In Good Company
Organized by Université de Montpellier and LIRMM-CNRS with the support of the ANR project Polymnie, June 10-12 will see a really neat workshop on the use of epsilons and choice functions. The program is now online; if you can, you should go. This workshop aims at promoting work on Hilbert's Epsilon in a number of … Continue reading Hilbert’s Epsilon and Tau in Logic, Informatics and Linguistics
(Continues part 1, part 2, and part 3; fork the full text on GitHub) Branches Programmers are fond of using "branches" in their code. A code branch is a version of the entire project that shares it change history, but includes some changes the main branch (usually called "master") does not (yet) contain. This is … Continue reading Git for Victorianists, erm, Philosophers (pt. 4)
(Continues part 1 and part 2; fork the full text on GitHub) Forks and Pull Requests If you have push access to a repository, you can sync your local clone with the remte on GitHub or GitLab directly. But many projects do allow push access only to a select group of people to make sure … Continue reading Git for Philosophers (pt. 3)
As part of the 650-year celebration of the University of Vienna, the Institute Vienna Circle is putting on an exhibition on the Vienna Circle. The exhibition opens tomorrow. A central part of our exhibition will be devoted to the history of the racist and political persecution of intellectuals and scholars, leading to the exodus of … Continue reading Vienna Circle Exhibition
Continues Git for Philosophers (pt. 1) Collaborative Writing with Git Collaborative writing presents similar issues as collaborative programming: different people making changes to the same document from different locations. Sending the document back and forth is inefficient: only one person can work on it at a time, and there is a risk of changes being … Continue reading Git for Philosophers (pt. 2)
In the most recent issue of the Bulletin, J. J. Green, Marcus Rossberg and Philip Ebert discuss the typography of Frege's Grundgesetze. J. J. Green, Marcus Rossberg and Philip A. Ebert, “The Convenience of the Typesetter; Notation and Typography in Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik”, Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 21, no. 1, 15–30, Mar. 2015. … Continue reading Nerdiest Paper Ever? Green, Rossberg, Ebert on the Typography of Frege’s Grundgesetze