This last Thursday I held a little workshop to tell our graduate students about LaTeX.  Since LaTeX is fairly commonly used by philosophers, I thought they should at least know what it's all about.  I made a presentation (the handout version contains additional info).  I didn't have time to provide a list of documents/sites to … Continue reading LaTeX for Philosophers

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Steve Awodey (CMU) explains the relevance of the foundational program of homotopy type theory and the univalence axiom to the philosophy of mathematics in a new preprint, "Structuralism, Invariance, and Univalence." Recent advances in foundations of mathematics have led to some developments that are signicant for the philosophy of mathematics, particularly structuralism. Specically, the discovery … Continue reading Awodey Explains Significance of Homotopy Type Theory to Philosophy of Mathematics

Going through old emails, I found the following announcement by Larry Paulson, posted to the FOM list by Jeremy Avigad.  Good stuff, including the link to Stanis?aw ?wierczkowski's monograph in Dissertationes Mathematicae where he carries out the proof of the incompleteness theorems in HF, the theory of hereditarily finite sets. This should be of independent … Continue reading Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems Formally Verified

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo  Ergo is a general, open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions. This includes, among other things: history of philosophy, work in both the analytic and continental traditions, as well as formal and empirically informed philosophy. Ergo uses a triple-anonymous peer review process and aims to return … Continue reading Ergo, An Open Access Journal of Philosophy

The online Youtube channel PBS Ideas is doing a segment on the realism/antirealism debate in the philosophy of mathematics as one of "10 Unanswered Questions of Science". The format doesn't lend itselft to much nuance, the views mentioned are naive, and it's a bit frustrating that the only philosopher referred to is Alain Badiou, but … Continue reading PBS: Math Might Not Actually Exist

You probably already know about the two packages that you can use to typeset Fitch-style natural deducation proofs in LaTeX.  Here's another, which you may be interested in if you use Barker-Plummer, Barwise, and Etchemendy's popular logic text Language, Proof, and Logic. It makes proofs like this: I've taken Etch's original style file and Dave's … Continue reading LaTeX Package for Typesetting Fitch Proofs LPL-Style

If you're in Austin, you probably know this already. If you're not, it's probably too late. But this is what I'll be doing this weekend: Friday, 26 April 2012Thomas Uebel, University of Manchester, “The Logic of Science and the Pragmatics of Science: The Challenge of Complementarity.”Christopher French, University of British Columbia, “Carnap, Jeffrey and Explication … Continue reading Formal Epistemology and the Legacy of Logical Empiricism

Have you ever given a presentation at a conference using your laptop, and then were annoyed that you had to carry aroudn the thing for the entire rest of the evening?  It happens to me all the time. By which I mean, once in a great while, but I nevertheless though it would be cool … Continue reading Running Beamer Presentations from Your Phone

New entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia: Logical Pluralism

We train professional philosophers. Sadly, there aren't enough philosophy jobs to go around, and it's hard to pursue a career in philosophy if you can't move to wherever you find a job.  Fortunately, philosophers have transferable skills that are in high demand. Prospective employers just don't associate these skills with "Ph.D. in philosophy".  The challenge … Continue reading How To Get A Job Outside Academia With a Ph.D. in Philosophy

The ASL Committee in Logic Education organized a thought-provoking session this morning at the APA Central Division in New Orleans.  There were four presentations and a lively discussion.  What are your thoughts? Andy Arana started things off with observations about salient differences between what we do in intro logic classes vs. what, e.g., mathematics departments … Continue reading Logic in the Philosophy Undergraduate Curriculum

All six of last year's lectures we had at Calgary's Turing Year series are now available for you to watch on mathtube.org. Thanks again to PIMS for videotaping, editing, and hosting them!  The full list: John R. Ferris: Alan Turing and Enigma Central to Alan Turing's posthumous reputation is his work with British codebreaking during the … Continue reading Turing Centenary Lectures

The first half of our Alan Turing Centenary lecture series is over, and we've got all three of our talks up on mathtube.org.  You can skip the first one, it's pretty boring, but Mike Williams on early computers and John Ferris on Turing and WWII codebreaking are well worth your time!

It's Alan Turing's centenary, and we've been celebrating it at the University of Calgary with a series of lectures.  This term, we've had a talk on the decision problem, one (by Mike Williams) on Turing and early electronic comupters, and one coming up on March 27, by John Ferris, on Alan Turing and codebreaking in … Continue reading Alan Turing Year in Calgary

Been waiting a while for this to become official, which it now is: we're hiring. In case you don't know, the CRC program is Canada's effort to attract outstanding foreigntalent to Canada. So there is no preference for Canadians, you get atop-up to your salary, and the teaching load is 1-1.  Tier I Canada Research … Continue reading Senior Position in Logic and Philosophy of Science at Calgary!

Ruth Barcan Marcus died February 19. She was a towering figure in philosophical logic in the latter half of the 20th century.  She initiated the study of quantified modal logic in her 1946 JSL paper, "A functional calculus of first order based on strict implication".  Facing strong opposition from Quine, who thought quantified modal logic … Continue reading Ruth Barcan Marcus, 1921-2012

We got a 1-year job for you! The Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary invites applications for a one-year postdoctoral fellowship starting on September 1, 2012. The area of specialization is logic or the philosophy of science. The fellow will be expected to have a well-defined research project, teach up to one course … Continue reading Postdoc in Logic or Philosophy of Science

The title essay of Quine's The Ways of Paradox was originally published in the Scientific American 206 (April 1962). Retrodigitized back issues of the Scientific American are now available (for free, it seems) on the website of Nature.  You can now read Quine's classic essay in its full original glory, complete with neat illustrations such … Continue reading Illustrated Ways of Paradox Complete with 1960’s Ads

Thanks to Daniel Weller