CUP is giving away copies of Martin Gardner's New Mathematical Library if you can solve a logic puzzle--any reader of this blog should be able to solve this one! N.B. The rules that say: These books represent new editions of Gardner’s massive Scientific American corpus. Many people know these puzzles by heart. If you do, … Continue reading Win Gardner Book by Solving Puzzle

My colleague Robin Cockett and I have been running a research group here at Calgary where the various computer scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers interested in logic, theory, foundations, etc. meet and present work. For a long time we've had weekly meetings and everything went great, but then both Robin and I went on leave and … Continue reading Calgary Peripatetic Research Group in Logic and Category Theory

The ASL Newsletter went out today, and it looks like the Winter Meeting will be very exciting: 2008-09 ASL Winter Meeting (with APA) Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaDecember 27–30, 2008This meeting will be held jointly with the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. The program includes three invited sessions. For the first, a … Continue reading Kripke on Hilbert’s Program

The Vienna International Summer University next year (July 13-24, 2009) will be on the topic "The Culture of Science and Its Philosophy". Call for Participation just came in. Stupid framed website: to apply, go to the website, then click on "Application" in the navigation bar on the left. Call for ApplicationApplication deadline: January 30, 2009 … Continue reading Vienna International Summer University 2009: The Culture of Science and Its Philosophy

I'm going to pretend I'm not in the timezone I'm in, and that it's still OneWebDay. And sing the praises of the internet. Specifically, "today," I realized again how much I depend on the availability of information on the internet and the communication possibilities it opens up. As examples, two things: Hotel room, 3am, preparing … Continue reading Thank You, Internet

The "Nobel of philosophy and logic" was awarded this year to Thomas Nagel. And the Schock Prize in mathematics goes to Endre Szemerédi. Full citations here (PDF).Update: I forgot that these were actually announced back in May. There's a symposium at the Swedisch Academy in honor of Nagel tomorrow.

These will go in a homework assignment in my next Intro Logic class.

In February of last year, BIRS had an amazing workshop on "Mathematical Methods in Philosophy". We (i.e., Aldo Antonelli, Alasdair Urquhart, and I) collected some of the very exciting contributions from that workshop in a Special Issue of the new Review of Symbolic Logic, and that issue is now online! We even managed to get … Continue reading Mathematical Methods in Philosophy is Out!

In Bloglines, the atom feed for LogBlog shows up as "does not exist", and it has so for a couple of days. Is that just me? Maybe I should just switch to Google Reader, but Google is almost taking on a Microsoft-ish quality in my mind. Plus, not sure it can do the blogroll the … Continue reading Bloglines Problems

This just came in over the wire: A new project on the Foundations of Logical Consequence will start at the University of St Andrews in January 2009. Details of the project can be found at:http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/projects/logic/The project will run for three and a half years from January 2009 until June 2012. There are two post-doctoral posts … Continue reading Arché Project on Logical Consequence

This one I found not on the internets, but in the Berkeley math library! John Burgess has a collection of philosophical papers out: Mathematics, Models, and Modality. It includes the classics "Why I am not a nominalist", "Mathematics and Bleak House", "Can truth out?", and "Quinus ab omni noevo vindicatus". Must buy, must read!

So, sabbatical is over, I'm back in Calgary, started to teach yesterday (history of analytic, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem--from Peter's book). I saved so many posts in my reader over the summer that now there's more saved posts than new posts every day. Let's clean house. Graham Priest's Introduction to Non-classical Logic, 2nd edition, is … Continue reading Cleaning House

Wow, this is amazing:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM&hl=en&fs=1]Now that's what I call science communication! I look forward to the new EP from Kate McAlpine (emcee) and Will Barras (beats).PS: xkcd is on today as well.

The Summer Schools in Logic and Learning will be held January 26-February 6, 2009, and you're invited: An Open Invitation to attend theSummer Schools in Logic and Learning26 January to 6 February 2009Australian National University, Canberra, AustraliaOne of the grand challenges in science and engineering is to build computer systems that are trustworthy and intelligent. … Continue reading Summer Schools in Logic and Learning (in the Winter)

Rosalie Iemhoff has a new entry on intuitionism in the philosophy of mathematics for the Stanford Encyclopedia. It explains the basics of intuitionistic mathematics. Together with Mark van Atten's entries on the history of intuitionistic logic and on Brouwer, and Joan Rand Moschovakis's entry on intuitionistic logic, the SEP is now probably the premier source … Continue reading Intuitionism in the SEP

Greg Lavers has a review of the Cambridge Companion to Carnap at NDPR. (HT: Greg Frost-Arnold)

SSHRC has posted the list of funded projects from the most recent Standard Research Grants competition. These grants are for three years. Last year's results are here (plus lots of discussion on the politics of SSHRC in the comments section).This year's stats: 92 applications (2007: 88; 2006: 85, 2005: 96, 2004: 92), 28 grants, for … Continue reading 2008 Canadian Research Grants to Philosophers

Last year in May, Berkeley held a conference in honor of Bill Craig, who will turn 90 this coming November. Bill is probably best known for the Craig Interpolation Theorem and the theorem that every recursively enumerable theory is recursively axiomatizable. Just in time, the Festschrift arising from that conference has appeared online. It's a … Continue reading Interpolations: Essays in Honor of William Craig

Henri Cartan, last surviving member of the original Bourbakistes, died on August 13. He'll be remembered not just for his mathematical work, but also for his political engagement for human rights and European federalism. Obits:Daily TelegraphDie ZeitLe FigaroLe MondeNew York TimesWashington Post (HT: Giuseppina Ronzitti)