Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo  Ergo is a general, open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions. This includes, among other things: history of philosophy, work in both the analytic and continental traditions, as well as formal and empirically informed philosophy. Ergo uses a triple-anonymous peer review process and aims to return…

The online Youtube channel PBS Ideas is doing a segment on the realism/antirealism debate in the philosophy of mathematics as one of “10 Unanswered Questions of Science“. The format doesn’t lend itselft to much nuance, the views mentioned are naive, and it’s a bit frustrating that the only philosopher referred to is Alain Badiou, but…

You probably already know about the two packages that you can use to typeset Fitch-style natural deducation proofs in LaTeX.  Here’s another, which you may be interested in if you use Barker-Plummer, Barwise, and Etchemendy’s popular logic text Language, Proof, and Logic. It makes proofs like this: I’ve taken Etch’s original style file and Dave’s…

If you’re in Austin, you probably know this already. If you’re not, it’s probably too late. But this is what I’ll be doing this weekend: Friday, 26 April 2012Thomas Uebel, University of Manchester, “The Logic of Science and the Pragmatics of Science: The Challenge of Complementarity.”Christopher French, University of British Columbia, “Carnap, Jeffrey and Explication…

Have you ever given a presentation at a conference using your laptop, and then were annoyed that you had to carry aroudn the thing for the entire rest of the evening?  It happens to me all the time. By which I mean, once in a great while, but I nevertheless though it would be cool…

New entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia: Logical Pluralism

We train professional philosophers. Sadly, there aren’t enough philosophy jobs to go around, and it’s hard to pursue a career in philosophy if you can’t move to wherever you find a job.  Fortunately, philosophers have transferable skills that are in high demand. Prospective employers just don’t associate these skills with “Ph.D. in philosophy”.  The challenge…

The ASL Committee in Logic Education organized a thought-provoking session this morning at the APA Central Division in New Orleans.  There were four presentations and a lively discussion.  What are your thoughts? Andy Arana started things off with observations about salient differences between what we do in intro logic classes vs. what, e.g., mathematics departments…

All six of last year’s lectures we had at Calgary’s Turing Year series are now available for you to watch on mathtube.org. Thanks again to PIMS for videotaping, editing, and hosting them!  The full list: John R. Ferris: Alan Turing and Enigma Central to Alan Turing’s posthumous reputation is his work with British codebreaking during the…

The first half of our Alan Turing Centenary lecture series is over, and we’ve got all three of our talks up on mathtube.org.  You can skip the first one, it’s pretty boring, but Mike Williams on early computers and John Ferris on Turing and WWII codebreaking are well worth your time!