Category: Uncategorized

New book out from Princeton UP on the Graduate Education Initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, discussed on Inside Higher Ed. Not sure if any philosophy departments participated. In light of previous discussion on differential attrition rates for women in the pipeline, this should be interesting: Chapter 7 addresses a matter of continuing concern…

Following up on my previous post, Women in the Academic Pipeline, where I compared rates at which women earned BAs and PhDs in various fields in the US: what does it look like in the faculty ranks? Not surprisingly, the percentages in general go down as you go higher, but there are some interesting (and…

Topoi has a series of “untimely reviews”, where classic works of philosophy are reviewed as if they had just been published. Hannes Leitgeb did one on Carnap’s Aufbau, where he not only pretends that it was just published, but also pretends (as I guess you’d have to if you take the premise seriously) that it…

Catarina’s comment on the previous post prompted me to find out what the pipeline looks like in philosophy, and so I went to the tables from the Digest of Education Statistics (of the US, tables of Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by sex of student and field of study) and made…

I’m glad to see some more discussion of the gender situation in philosophy discussed more widely. It started with an article in The Philosopher’s Magazine, “Where are all the women?” which was then picked up in “A dearth of women philosophers” in the NYT. There are some interesting responses on Feminist Philosophers blog (first, second,…

Deductions is a program that is designed to help understand and construct proofs in natural deduction (in the Logic Book style). It runs only on Macs, so I couldn’t try it out, but the videos look interesting.

Since reading Logicomix (which, as I said, I really like), I’ve been wondering about the “logic and madness” theme that runs through the book. In the making-of movie (which I also recommend), Papadimitriou says at the beginning, “We were both interested in this very curious fact, that the majority of the protagonists of this intellectual…

A revised version of Hubert Kennedy‘s 1980 biography of Giuseppe Peano, is available as a free download and a cheap print-on-demand paperback through lulu.com: Peano: Life and Works of Giuseppe Peano.

Sydney Padua has produced a number of amazing and funny comics on Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and the Difference Engine. It’s a bit hard to navigate, to get to all three installments of “Lovelace and Babbage vs. The Economy” you have to click on the “Economic Model” link in the sidebar. The upside is, though,…

Several of the commenters on my previous post on motivating the study of logic in my intro class have suggested that one important aspect of logic is the precision it affords, and hence the usefulness of logic in avoiding ambiguities. So I tried to find some nice examples of where ambiguity in natural language—and the…