Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Ask Your Librarian to Subscribe to PhilPapers!
PhilPapers now has almost 1.75 million entries. Like the Stanford Encyclopedia, the project is non-profit and largely run by volunteers. In order to be sustainable, they do need funding. And like the Stanford Encyclopedia, they are asking for our help: so ask your library to subscribe! The merger of Philosophy Research Index into PhilPapers has…
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Logicians Yap, Kooi Explain Viral Birthday Logic Puzzle
You’ve probably seen the “birthday logic puzzle” that’s gone viral in the past few days. If you haven’t, you might want to try to solve it yourself. Here it is: Two dynamic epistemic logicians, Audrey Yap (UVic) and Barteld Kooi (Groningen) explained the solution (and how to get it) on facebook. “Dynamic” here modifies “epistemic”,…
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Logic without Borders: Essays in Honor of Jouko Väänänen
A Festschrift for Jouko Väänänen‘s 60th birthday is now out with de Gruyter, edited by Åsa Hirvonen, Juha Kontinen, Roman Kossak, and Andrés Villaveces: In recent years, mathematical logic has developed in many directions, the initial unity of its subject matter giving way to a myriad of seemingly unrelated areas. The articles collected here, which…
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Moshe Vardi Elected Fellow of SIAM
SIAM just announced its list of Fellows for 2015, and it includes Moshe Vardi. The citation reads: Moshe Y. Vardi is Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He is being recognized for contributions to the development of logic as…
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Quine’s Paradox and Gödel’s Theorem
It’s a commonplace to compare Gödel’s theorem to the liar paradox: The sentence This sentence is not true. is neither true nor false. Switch out “provable” for “true” and you get This sentence is not provable. and, modulo some technical stuff, this sentence is then neither provable nor refutable. But of course the “modulo some…
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My Sessions at the Pacific
I’m organizing two sessions at the Pacific APA; please join me there! Thursday, April 2, morning, 9-noon: 4A Book Symposium: Greg Frost-Arnold, Carnap, Tarski, and Quine at Harvard: Conversations on Logic, Mathematics, and Science Speakers: Richard Creath (Arizona State University) Gary Ebbs (Indiana University Bloomington) Greg Lavers (Concordia University) Greg Frost-Arnold (Hobart and William Smith…
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Falso
A computer-verified proof of ⊥: https://github.com/clarus/falso (h/t Byron Cook)
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Petr Vopěnka, 1935-2015
The Czech logician and set theorist Petr Vopěnka has died. He has made significant contributions to classical set theory and founded alternative set theory. You may find this 2006 documentary by Andrea Slováková interesting (Czech with English subtitles). Obituaries: Prague Monitor
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Academic Genealogy Graphed
The Mathematics Genealogy project is a huge database of mathematicians, where and when they got their degrees, and who their advisors were. (There’s also a wiki-based Philosophy Genealogy.) Nice pastime when the polar vortex keeps you from leaving the house: find famous people in your academic family tree. If you’re in the Mathematics Genealogy, you…
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CfP: Hilbert’s Epsilon and Tau in Logic, Informatics and Linguistics
Dates: June 10-12, 2015Location: Montpellier, FranceSubmission deadline: April 1, 2015 This workshop aims at promoting work on Hilbert’s epsilon calculus in a number of relevant fields ranging from Philosophy and Mathematics to Linguistics and Informatics. The Epsilon and Tau operators were introduced by David Hilbert, inspired by Russell’s Iota operator for definite descriptions, as binding…
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