Category: Uncategorized

With the kind permission of Brian Leiter, here’s a breakout of the Canadian philosophy departments by specialty according to the 2009 Philosophical Gourmet Report. Major changes over the last (2008-10) edition: The Guelph-Laurier-McMaster program is no longer ranked, and neither is Waterloo. The “local means”, i.e., mean scores from Canadian evaluators, are no longer reported.…

The Conservative government’s budget includes additional funding for Canada’s granting councils to expand their graduate scholarship programs. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada stands to gain an additional $17.5 million, or 500 additional PhD scholarships and 1,000 additional MA scholarships. The catch: SSHRC’s money is earmarked for “business-related degrees”. If you’re Canadian,…

In Krister Segerberg’s modal logic seminar here in Calgary, we were talking about propositional dynamic logic last week. PDL was originally introduced (by Vaughn Pratt in the early 70’s) to reason about programs. In the language, you have propositional variables but then also variables for (indeterministic) programs. Moreover, you have complex terms for programs, e.g.,…

I’m a bit late with this, but if you haven’t heard, here are a couple of interesting new blogs: It’s Only a Theory, a group blog on philosophy of science, including logicians/philosophers of math/historians of analytic philosophy Otávio Bueno, Elaine Landry, and Chris Pincock of (Honest Toil fame) B-log, a “logic-leaning philosophy blog” by JC…

Luciano Floridi has been awarded the Barwise Prize in philosophy of computing, given out annually by the APA.

Logic I exercise: Formalize “Every day each of us says the dumbest thing we are going to say that day.” Is it logically true?

The submission deadline for the July conference Computability in Europe is drawing near (Jan 20). I hope there will be at least a few papers on history and philosophy of computability–the PC chair tells me that so far there are none!

Arne Næss has died at the age of 96. He was the last surviving member of the “periphery” of the Vienna Circle. Notice here.

Here’s a more detailed summary of the paper I just mentioned, (Ciabattoni, Galatos, and Terui, From axioms to analytic rules in nonclassical logics, LICS 2008) courtesy of Agata: The paper contains a first step towards the definition of a general procedure to turn Hilbert axioms into analytic structural rules in various formalisms. The result is…

Over lunch the other day, my friend and colleague Agata Ciabattoni told me about her paper at this year’s LICS, “From axioms to analytic rules in nonclassical logics“. In it, she and her co-authors Nikolaos Galatos and Kazushige Terui present an intriguing and very general result: Suppose you have a logic which can be axiomatized…