With the kind permission of Brian Leiter, here's a breakout of the Canadian philosophy departments by specialty according to the 2009 Philosophical Gourmet Report. Major changes over the last (2008-10) edition: The Guelph-Laurier-McMaster program is no longer ranked, and neither is Waterloo. The "local means", i.e., mean scores from Canadian evaluators, are no longer reported. … Continue reading Canadian PhD Programs in the 2009 Philosophical Gourmet Report

The Conservative government's budget includes additional funding for Canada's granting councils to expand their graduate scholarship programs. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada stands to gain an additional $17.5 million, or 500 additional PhD scholarships and 1,000 additional MA scholarships. The catch: SSHRC's money is earmarked for "business-related degrees".If you're Canadian, please … Continue reading Save Canadian Grad Student Funding in Humanties and Social Sciences!

In Krister Segerberg's modal logic seminar here in Calgary, we were talking about propositional dynamic logic last week. PDL was originally introduced (by Vaughn Pratt in the early 70's) to reason about programs. In the language, you have propositional variables but then also variables for (indeterministic) programs. Moreover, you have complex terms for programs, e.g., … Continue reading Interpretations of Propositional Dynamic Logic

I'm a bit late with this, but if you haven't heard, here are a couple of interesting new blogs: It's Only a Theory, a group blog on philosophy of science, including logicians/philosophers of math/historians of analytic philosophy Otávio Bueno, Elaine Landry, and Chris Pincock of (Honest Toil fame)B-log, a "logic-leaning philosophy blog" by JC Beall … Continue reading New Blogs

Luciano Floridi has been awarded the Barwise Prize in philosophy of computing, given out annually by the APA.

Logic I exercise: Formalize "Every day each of us says the dumbest thing we are going to say that day." Is it logically true?

The submission deadline for the July conference Computability in Europe is drawing near (Jan 20). I hope there will be at least a few papers on history and philosophy of computability--the PC chair tells me that so far there are none!

Arne Næss has died at the age of 96. He was the last surviving member of the "periphery" of the Vienna Circle.Notice here.

Here's a more detailed summary of the paper I just mentioned, (Ciabattoni, Galatos, and Terui, From axioms to analytic rules in nonclassical logics, LICS 2008) courtesy of Agata: The paper contains a first step towards the definition of a general procedure to turn Hilbert axioms into analytic structural rules in various formalisms. The result is … Continue reading More on Ciabattoni, Galatos, and Terui

Over lunch the other day, my friend and colleague Agata Ciabattoni told me about her paper at this year's LICS, "From axioms to analytic rules in nonclassical logics". In it, she and her co-authors Nikolaos Galatos and Kazushige Terui present an intriguing and very general result: Suppose you have a logic which can be axiomatized … Continue reading Bleg: Systematic Approaches to Generation of Logical Calculi

In addition to the new special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gödel's Dialectica interpretation, Wiley-Blackwell has made the original Dialectica issue in which it appeared freely available. That issue itself was a Festschrift in honour of Paul Bernays's 70th birthday. (I'm sorry I'm late to herewith commemorate the 120th birthday of Bernays, who was … Continue reading Paul Bernays at 120

Gödel's paper containing his so-called Dialectica interpretation was published 50 years ago in, well, Dialectica. And so Dialectica has a special issue on Gödel's Dialectica interpretation, edited by Thomas Strahm. It looks like all the articles are freely available. Here's (most of) the introduction: Gödel's famous dialectica paper (1958), entitled 'Über eine bisher noch nicht … Continue reading The 50th Birthday of the Dialectica Interpretation

Shawn beat me to it: Katalin Bimbó, who's now at the University of Alberta, just published a nice entry on combinatory logic in the SEP.

Via Theorem(e), I've come across the webpage of Konrad Zdanowski, a logician at the Polish Academy and Paris 7. His papers (mostly on arithmetic) all look incredibly interesting, he has lecture notes on Peano arithmetic, and there's also a paper on 2nd order intuitionistic propositional logic, which is somewhat related to my own research. If … Continue reading Papers by Konrad Zdanowski

Sitting in a talk at CMU by Bill Tait on cut elimnation for predicative systems. His approach, in contrast to Rathjen and Takeuti, is to try to get the cut-elimination proof to be mostly (or even, only) about the proofs, and not about proofs and (mostly) ordinal notation systems. He's using the original Tait calculus, … Continue reading Tait, Cut-Elimination for Predicative Systems

David Chalmers and David Bourget are setting up a new online resource for papers in philosophy, for which they're designing a taxonomy of philosophical topics to be used for classifying papers in the database. David asks For now, I'm calling for feedback from the philosophical community, either via e-mail or via comments on this blog. … Continue reading Taxonomy for Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics

My former colleague Charlie Martin died last Thursday. He was a major figure in metaphysics, one of the first to talk about truthmakers.Obituaries here and here.

The venerable Swedish philosophy journal Theoria is published by Blackwell since this past March, and that means it is online, including the back issues. I'm not sure of the exact dates, but in the 70s, when Krister Segerberg was the editor-in-chief of that journal, Theoria was the place to publish modal logic and formal philosophy. … Continue reading Theoria Online (Including Back Issues!)

One very common informal statement of Gödel's theorem is that it shows that for any (sufficiently strong consistent blah blah) formal system, there are truths that it can't prove. And if you don't formulate Gödel's incompleteness theorem that way, at least you state this as a corollary: Gödel's theorem shows that truth and provability (in … Continue reading Tarski on Gödel’s Theorem and the Deductive Method

Today's Dinosaur Comics was written by xkcd's Randall Munroe:Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics, has used philosophical/logical themes in his comic as well, e.g., the Twin Earth comic, or the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc comic, or the one on pragmatism. This one is pretty funny, too.Of course, you've all seen the xkcd comic … Continue reading Zeno’s Paradox at Dinosaur Comics