In a comment to an Antimeta post about the Formal Epistemology Workshop, Jon Cohen asks: [W]hat's the deal with the "commentator" listed for some of the talks? To me it sounds like someone will be sitting there saying things like "Kenny has gone for the slide striptease trick, not sure how this will go down … Continue reading A better way to run comments at philosophy talks?

Since school's out, I thought I'd try to spend some of my time otherwise than reading, writing, and grading. So I started a blog about things to do in Calgary. Not that many of you care, but perhaps there's someone from Calgary reading this. My plan for next Summer is to actually go out and … Continue reading My Other Life, er, Blog

The Society for Exact Philosophy is meeting in Toronto right now. (Someone told me that the name of the society is a joke, but maybe they were joking. It's serious philosophy, in any event. And it's the 33rd annual conference, so if it's a joke, it's a long-running joke.) The keynote speakers are Jason Stanley, … Continue reading Exact Philosophy

John MacFarlane's entry on logical constants is up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Everyone interested in this should also read John's dissertation (including me, I admit).

Stewart Shapiro posted a little "Primer on Vagueness" on the FOM list yesterday.

There are two new logic blogs linked on the sidebar. The first is Andrej Bauer's Mathematics and Computation, the other is Logicomp, a blog on logic and complexity theory by Anthony Widjaja at the University of Toronto.

This year's workshop Prologic 2005, July 6-8 at LSE, will focus on objective Bayesianism. Registration deadline is June 3.

There's an interesting discussion going on at Leiter's blog and on Certain Doubts about Dreben and the history of analytic philosophy. I recommend especially Jason Stanley's comment on the Certain Doubts post.While on the subject of Dreben, I thought I'd point out something pointed out to me not too long ago by Bill Tait. Dreben … Continue reading Dreben, Logic, Nonsense, Herbrand

I try to keep an eye out for uses of logical connectives, etc., in "everyday life" that I can use in logic classes. Here's a nice use of excluded middle, in which neither disjunct is assertible, from "Two to go," the penultimate episode of Buffy, Season Six. Or maybe it's really an example of the … Continue reading Buffy and Disjunction

The deadline for submissions of abstracts to the Logic Colloquium in Athens this summer has been extended to May 7. Which is a good thing, 'cause I totally forgot about it.

Kurt Gödel would have been 99 years old today. Happy Birthday, Kurtele! And Merry Gödelmas to everyone else.

Georges Gonthier (MS Research, Cambridge) has a paper up entitled "A computer-checked proof of the Four Colour Theorem." The original proof of the theorem by Appel and Haken relied on computer programs checking a very large number of cases, and raised some important conceptual and philosophical issues (see Tymoczko, "The four-color theorem and its philosophical … Continue reading Four Color Theorem Verified in Coq

I committed to teach a course on Logical Positivism next year, and I have to figure out which books I should order. Here's a list; if you have any comments or ideas, please let me know. Carnap, The Logical Construction of the World Ayer, Logical Positivism Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism … Continue reading Course on Logical Positivism

Lillian sent me an email today about the APA Session on Logic Instruction where she asked: Was there any discussion about incorporating philosophical issues in logic @ the intro course level? I'm teaching a logic for philosophers course this semester. Most of my students haven't had any formal logic, so I'm teaching it like an … Continue reading Motivating Intro Logic for Philosophy majors (and others)

Gillian linked* to a paper by Gil Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni, which contains this nice explanation of the distiction between inference (reasoning) and implication (what follows from what): A related problem with the traditional picture is its treatment of deductive principles like (D) as rules of inference. In fact they are rules of about what … Continue reading Inference vs. Implication

I've put up materials from the panel discussion on Logic in Philosophy Graduate Training at the 2005 ASL Spring Meeting, which featured Michael Glanzberg, Ted Sider, and Brian Weatherson, and which Andy Arana and I organized. The materials include slides for Michael's and my talks, notes for Ted's talk, and Andy's paper, as well as … Continue reading Logic Instruction and Philosophy Graduate Training

If you've read Brouwer or Heyting, you've probably seen examples involving the question if 0123456789 occurs in the decimal expansion of π. I wasn't aware that it's been known for a few years that it does: the first time at the 17,387,594,880th digit. There's also 10 consecutive 7's starting at 22,869,046,249.

I'm scheduled to teach a course on modal logic in the Fall. So I'll have to think about a textbook choice pretty soon. Last time I've used Fitting and Mendelsohn's First-order Modal Logic (Kluwer, 1999), which I quite like. It's accessible, which is important, since many of the students will be philosophy majors with little … Continue reading Modal Logic Textbooks

This year's LPAR will be held in Montego Bay, Jamaica--in early December. I missed the meetings in Havana and Reunion (Had papers and didn't go! What was I thinking?) so it's probably time to put on my computer science hat and write something.

At the Logic Education session at the APA/ASL meeting last week, Branden Fitelson made an excellent suggestion for teachers of graduate level logic courses in philosophy: One of the main problems is that it is often hard to see for students why the stuff they have to learn is relevant to philosophy (or to CS … Continue reading Motivating Advanced Logic