Ernst Specker died on December 10, in Zurich.  He is most well-known for his work on Quine's New Foundations and the Kochen-Specker Theorem in quantum mechanics. He made significant contributions to many other areas of logic, as well as algebra, topology, and combinatorics. Specker's MacTutor biography.

Follow link for the mouseover text!

Two interesting new entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia: Philosophy of Linguistics, by Barbara C. Scholz, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, and Geoffrey K. Pullum Montague Semantics, by Theo M. V. Janssen

The first annual conference of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy will be held at McMaster University, Hamilton (Canada) 24-26 May 2012. Invited Speakers Michael Friedman (Stanford University)Paolo Mancosu (University of California, Berkeley)Thomas Uebel (University of Manchester) Canadian Student Presenters Travel Bursaries SSHAP will be offering up to 10 travel … Continue reading CfP: Mind, Language and Cognition: Historical Perspectives.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

The Vienna University of Technology is looking to recruit one Postdoctoral Research Assistant to work on the FWF-funded project "Nonclassical Proofs: theory, applications and tools", under the direction of Agata Ciabattoni. The work will take place within the Institute of Computer Languages (Theory and Logic group) of the Vienna University of Technology. The post is … Continue reading Postdoc in Proof Theory in Vienna

Phil Serchuk's paper (with Ian Hargreaves and me) describing some experimental philosophy of logic he did when he was writing his undergrad thesis with me back in '05 is now out in Mind and Language.  It's a response to a 1999 paper by Tim Williamson together with psychologists Bonini, Osherson, and Viale, and we also … Continue reading Four Experimental Studies on Vagueness

My "boss" on the Carnap Edition project, Richard Creath, has a new entry on Logical Empiricism for the Stanford Encyclopedia.

Everyone should read this new entry in the SEP.  Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones (1848–1922), a contemporary of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge University, worked primarily in philosophical logic and ethics. Her most significant contribution to the former area is her application of the intension-extension distinction to singular terms, anticipating Frege's related distinction … Continue reading E. E. C. Jones in the SEP

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary invites applications for a one-year postdoctoral fellowship starting on September 1, 2011. The area of specialization is logic or the philosophy of science. The fellow will be expected to have a well-defined research project, teach one course in the area of specialization, and participate in the … Continue reading Postdoc in Logic/Philosophy of Science at Calgary

The AGM Theory of Belief Revision was 25 years old last year, and the JPL has a special anniversary issue on it.

The Swedish Academy awarded the 2011 Rolf Schock Prize to Hilary Putnam "for his contribution to the understanding of semantics for theoretical and ‘natural kind’ terms, and of the implications of this semantics for philosophy, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science and metaphysics". Here's the citation: Hilary Putnam is one of the most versatile philosophers … Continue reading Hilary Putnam Awarded 2011 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy

From Hannes Leitgeb's new Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the LMU Munich: Four doctoral fellowships are being advertised at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). The MCMP, which is devoted to applications of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy, has recently been established at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) based on generous support by the … Continue reading PhD Fellowships in Mathematical Philosophy in Munich

LogBlog moved last year. I've tried to make it noticeable as little as possible--the RSS feed has been redirected for a while. So even if your feed reader is set to www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/atom.xml you stil get the new posts.  But you should really change it!  (to http://www.ucalgary.ca/rzach/rss.xml) And now I've also put in redirects from all … Continue reading LogBlog Move

Since Leiter just quoted data on women in philosophy faculty positions collected by Kathryn Norlock, and over at Feminist Philosophers someone asked for a breakdown by tenure status, here it is. This is survey data from 2003 (the same dataset from which the figures Leiter quotes come) which means there is sampling error. The first … Continue reading Representation of Women in Philosophy, Again

My colleagues Marian Dörk and Sheelagh Carpendale over in the Computer Science department have taken data on philosophers from Freebase as a test case for their EdgeMaps visualization project. Freebase provides data about interests, professions, birthdates, influence connections, and other relations from Wikipedia. For the purpose of this paper, we have constrained the dataset to … Continue reading Visual Representation of Philosophers’ Significance and Influence

New entry on the Liar Paradox by Michael Glanzberg and JC Beall.

As part of the work of the Committee on Logic Education of the Association of Symbolic Logic, Marcia Groszek and Tamara Lakins organized a special session on logic in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum at the Joint Mathematics Meeting last month in New Orleans.  The session was very successful: excellent talks, good turnout.  The talks were: … Continue reading Logic in the Undergraduate Mathematics Curriculum

Just happened upon this LanguageLog post on "begging the question" from last year.  Very interesting!