The finalists for the Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Prizes have been announced. They are: Pre-doctoral category David Fernández: Non-Deterministic Semantics for Dynamic Topological LogicEkaterina Fokina: Index Sets for Some Classes of StructuresPavel Hrubes: On lengths of proofs in non-classical logicsMaryanthe Malliaris: Realization of phi-types and Keisler's orderKentaro Sato: The Strength of Extensionality - Weak Weak … Continue reading Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Prize Finalists

John Burgess has a draft of a book on Philosophical Logic up on his website. It focusses on logics with direct philosophical relevance. It starts with temporal and modal logic, deals with conditional logics, "relevantistic" logics, and intuitionistic logic. It will be a relatively slim volume, but there's still a lot of interest in here: … Continue reading John Burgess, Philosophical Logic

Mike Kaspari of Getting things done in academia has a useful checklist of things to do before you send off a paper. It talks about "data", "results", and "controls", but it mostly applies to logic or philosophy as well. Mike asks for input on what else one should do. (HT: Semantics etc.)

New SEP entry by Herb Enderton on "Second-order and Higher-order Logic".

Tim Chow has posted a new version of his "Beginner's guide to forcing" (previously announced here) on arXiv, and points to other introductions to forcing: one by Kenny Easwaran, who's also posted his "Cheerful introduction to forcing and the continuum hypothesis" on arXiv, and one by Peter Johnson, "Foundations for abstract forcing." I'm guessing the … Continue reading More Introductions to Forcing

CALL FOR PAPERS31st International Wittgenstein Symposium 2008 onReduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the SciencesKirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, 10-16 August 2008http://www.alws.at/ INVITED SPEAKERSWilliam Bechtel, Ansgar Beckermann, Johan van Benthem, Alexander Bird, Elke Brendel, Otavio Bueno, John P. Burgess, David Chalmers, Igor Douven, Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth Gemes, Volker Halbach, Stephan Hartmann, Alison Hills, Leon … Continue reading Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

The ASL Newsletter came in the mail today, so if you're a member, you should be getting yours about now as well. For the first time in a long while, the election to the ASL council is contested. I'm not going to ask you to vote for me, but you should vote!

From Tim Chow via FOM: I have just completed a first draft of an expository paper on forcing. http://alum.mit.edu/www/tchow/forcing.pdfThis paper grew out of a sci.math.research article that I posted back in 2001 entitled "Forcing for dummies": http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.research/msg/c2d65d1a23eabb66I made a major change, hopefully for the better, by approaching the subject via Boolean-valued models, which I believe … Continue reading A Beginner’s Guide to Forcing

I'm on sabbatical next term, and am off to Europe in one week--and it looks like that's not a day too soon. Teaching modal logic and history of analytic this term was a lot of fun, but I look forward to getting writing done. Don't have much planned yet, but I'll be in Toulouse for … Continue reading Sabbatical in one week!

A year and a half ago, Andy Arana and I organized a session at the Pacific APA about logic and philosophy graduate education. One of the panelists was Ted Sider, who spoke about what kinds of logic he thought a philosophy grad student should know. He's been teaching a course on exactly that, i.e., a … Continue reading Ted Sider: Logic for Philosophy

On FOM, Allen Hazen points to a review in Nature of Reviel Netz and William Noel's The Archimedes Codex. Here's Netz's own report on the relevant part of the palimpsest in which Archimedes comes up with the definition of equality between infinities in terms of a one-to-one correspondence. Also, transcript of Nova segment on the … Continue reading Archimedes on Infinity

Henry Kyburg, Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science at the University of Rochester and an eminent logician and formal epistemologist, passed away on October 30.

This list from Jon Cogburn's blog is pretty funny. I like the Quine bit particularly.

An addition to the list of programming languages named after logicians (e.g., Gödel, Haskell, Curry): Carnap The Carnap Programming LanguageProcess oriented programming: shared data structures and the concurrent processes that act upon them.Carnap is a general purpose programming language for the next generation of many-core devices, many many-core systems and their applications. It introduces a … Continue reading Carnap: The Programming Language

CSLI Lecture Notes are now part of the Stanford Medieval and Modern Thought Digitization Project. That means books such as Unger's Cut-elimination, Normalization, and the Theory of Proofs, Troelstra's Lectures on Linear Logic, Aczel's Non-well-founded Sets, van Benthem's Manual of Intensional Logic, and Goldblatt's Logics of Time and Computation are now available online and for … Continue reading CSLI Lecture Notes online and free

One of my favorite proof theory papers of all time: W. W. Tait. Normal derivability in classical logic. In: Jon Barwise, ed., The Syntax and Semantics of Infinitary Languages LNM 72. (Berlin: SPringer, 1968), pp. 204-236. Springer actually has this available online--which is neat, but of course only if your institution has access to the … Continue reading Classic logic papers, pt. 3: Normal derivability in classical logic

The Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik was one of the few logic journals around in the mid 20th century. It started publishing in 1955, I think the only logic journals that are older than it are the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1936), the Archiv für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung (1950) and Studia … Continue reading Zeitschrift für mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik

Looking through my CiteULike database today, I was reminded of this beautiful paper by Gallier, which tells you everything you wanted to know about the ordinal Γ0 and its proof-theoretic relevance. Section 6 is a wonderful overview of the theory of (constructive) countable ordinals.Jean H. Gallier. What's so special about Kruskal's theorem and the ordinal … Continue reading Classic Logic papers, pt. 2: Kruskal’s theorem and Γ0

The Ackermann Award is the EACSL's award for outstanding dissertations in logic in computer science. This year's award is shared by Dietmar BerwangerRWTH Aachen (Advisor: Erich Graedel)Thesis: Games and Logical Expressiveness Stéphane Lengrand Université de Paris VII and University of St. Andrews (Advisors: Delia Kesner and Roy Dyckhoff) Thesis: Normalization and Equivalence in Proof Theory … Continue reading Ackermann Award announced

Two new entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia just went on-line, brought to you by the authors and your friendly neighborhood History of Logic subject editors:Bolzano's logic, by Jan SebestikThe Frege-Hilbert controversy, by Patricia BlanchetteAlso interesting: Facts, by Kevin Mulligan and Fabrice Correia