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In addition to the new special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation, Wiley-Blackwell has made the original Dialectica issue in which it appeared freely available. That issue itself was a Festschrift in honour of Paul Bernays’s 70th birthday. (I’m sorry I’m late to herewith commemorate the 120th birthday of Bernays, who was…

Gödel’s paper containing his so-called Dialectica interpretation was published 50 years ago in, well, Dialectica. And so Dialectica has a special issue on Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation, edited by Thomas Strahm. It looks like all the articles are freely available. Here’s (most of) the introduction: Gödel’s famous dialectica paper (1958), entitled ‘Über eine bisher noch nicht…

Shawn beat me to it: Katalin Bimbó, who’s now at the University of Alberta, just published a nice entry on combinatory logic in the SEP.

Via Theorem(e), I’ve come across the webpage of Konrad Zdanowski, a logician at the Polish Academy and Paris 7. His papers (mostly on arithmetic) all look incredibly interesting, he has lecture notes on Peano arithmetic, and there’s also a paper on 2nd order intuitionistic propositional logic, which is somewhat related to my own research. If…

Sitting in a talk at CMU by Bill Tait on cut elimnation for predicative systems. His approach, in contrast to Rathjen and Takeuti, is to try to get the cut-elimination proof to be mostly (or even, only) about the proofs, and not about proofs and (mostly) ordinal notation systems. He’s using the original Tait calculus,…

David Chalmers and David Bourget are setting up a new online resource for papers in philosophy, for which they’re designing a taxonomy of philosophical topics to be used for classifying papers in the database. David asks For now, I’m calling for feedback from the philosophical community, either via e-mail or via comments on this blog.…

My former colleague Charlie Martin died last Thursday. He was a major figure in metaphysics, one of the first to talk about truthmakers. Obituaries here and here.

The venerable Swedish philosophy journal Theoria is published by Blackwell since this past March, and that means it is online, including the back issues. I’m not sure of the exact dates, but in the 70s, when Krister Segerberg was the editor-in-chief of that journal, Theoria was the place to publish modal logic and formal philosophy.…

One very common informal statement of Gödel’s theorem is that it shows that for any (sufficiently strong consistent blah blah) formal system, there are truths that it can’t prove. And if you don’t formulate Gödel’s incompleteness theorem that way, at least you state this as a corollary: Gödel’s theorem shows that truth and provability (in…

Today’s Dinosaur Comics was written by xkcd‘s Randall Munroe: Ryan North, the author of Dinosaur Comics, has used philosophical/logical themes in his comic as well, e.g., the Twin Earth comic, or the Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc comic, or the one on pragmatism. This one is pretty funny, too. Of course, you’ve all seen the…