Hello, all. Sorry for not posting lately. Anyway. Happy New Year! I pronounce 2007 the John Barkley Rosser, Sr. Centennial Year Rosser was born December 6, 1907 and was one of the pioneers of modern mathematical logic, especially, of recursion theory and the λ-calculus. He also contributed to areas such as number theory and ballistics. … Continue reading Rosser Centennial Year

Michael Strevens' course notes on Bayesian Confirmation Theory. (HT: Jason Stanley)

Nice of LtU to link to a classic paper that everyone should (re)read: Hoare's Axiomatic basis for computer programming.

(Organized by the Kurt Gödel Society with support from the John Templeton Foundation) The Kurt Gödel Society is proud to announce the commencement of the research fellowship prize program in honor and celebration of Kurt Gödel's 100th birthday.The research fellowship prize program sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation will offer: two Ph.D. (pre-doctoral) fellowships of … Continue reading Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Prize Fellowship

This is an interesting project: teach discrete mathematics not from a textbook, but using the historical papers that first dealt with the topics taught. A bunch of mathematicians and computer scientists at New Mexico State are doing that, and they're asking for your help: try it out in your courses, write them letters of support … Continue reading Teaching Logic from Historical Sources

2nd World Congress and School on Universal LogicCall for papersXi'an, China, August 16-22, 2007 This event is the second in a series of events whose objective is to gather logicians from all orientations (philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, artificial intelligence etc) - people not focusing only on some specific systems of logic or some particular … Continue reading Universal Logic in China

The Department of Mathematics of the Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD) invites applications for a Juniorprofessorship in Mathematics - Applied Logic (W1 B BesG) to be filled 1.4.2007.Applicants must be qualified in Applied Logic. Applications from candidates working in "Mathematical Proof Theory" (e.g. proof mining, proofs as programs, reverse mathematics, constructive formal systems) and/or "Computability … Continue reading Applied Logic Job in Darmstadt

table.lines td { vertical-align: top; border: 1px dashed gray; empty-cells: show; padding: 2pxWith the kind permission of Brian Leiter, here's a breakout of the Canadian philosophy departments by specialty according to the Philosophical Gourmet Report 2006-08. The same programs are ranked in 2006-08 as in the 2004-06 edition. This year, only the rank ordering of … Continue reading Canadian PhD programs in the 2006-08 PGR

I just spent a wonderful week in Kyoto at the invitation of Susumu Hayashi. Susumu's been working on Hilbert's notebooks, and he, Mariko Yasugi, Wilfried Sieg, Koji Nagatogawa, and I have had several days of interesting discussions about them. The last two days there was a workshop on Hilbert and computability, and it was a … Continue reading Hilbert in Kyoto

Julian Henkin sent me the link to Berkeley's obituary of Leon Henkin.

I just heard that Leon Henkin passed away earlier this week. He was a terrific logician and a terrific teacher. He will be missed.

Ok, this is hopefully my last paper ever on many-valued logics. Well, maybe not. In any case, it's done and will come out in APAL.

In an interesting thread titled "Recursive" on FOM last week there was a discussion on the history of primitive recursive functions. Of course, already Grassmann, Dedekind, and Peano gave primitive recursive definitions of individual functions such as addition and multiplication, and Skolem's 1923 article

I was asked in email about a good source about Goodstein sequences and the independence of Goodstein's Theorem from Peano Arithmetic. The independence result is due to Kirby and Paris in a 1983 paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (vol. 14), using the method of indicators. Georg Moser suggested the following paper … Continue reading Independence of Goodstein’s Theorem from PA

I'm going to be teaching philosophy of language next term. It's the first time--if you can believe that--we're offering a course with that title. We used to have a course called "Analytical Philosophy", which served that purpose, but it was also a history of analytic philosophy course. Anyway. I'd like to give my students a … Continue reading Philosophy of Language Texts?

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has posted a list of new Standard Research Grants for 2006. This year's stats: 85 applications (2005: 96, 2004: 92), 32 grants, for a success rate of 37% (2005: 38%, 2004: 48%). This year, new scholars (≤ 5 years beyond PhD) had a 29% success rate … Continue reading SSHRC Grants in Philosophy for 2006

Martin Löb has passed away on August 28. Obituary here.

In Prague this past week, David Miller gave a talk in which (among many other interesting things) he distinguished two notions of logical independence. One he credits to Moore (the mathematician, not the philosopher) and Wittgenstein, and that's the notion of independence at work when we say, e.g., that an axiom system is independent. A … Continue reading Notions of Logical Independence

I am very sorry. There will be more logic blogging very soon, I promise. I'm off to Prague for the Vagueness and Uncertainty workshop, and if the Academy of Sciences also has internet access in the villa they're putting me up in, I will liveblog it. Rosanna Keefe! Stewart Shapiro (who has a new book, … Continue reading Dear Matt

The Austrian newspaper Der Standard, of all things, reminded me of another centenary: Nelson Goodman would have turned 100 today.