Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

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…

Yesterday’s mail contained my copy of Logicomix: An Epic Search For Truth, a graphic novel by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna. It is scheduled to be released in the US on September 29, but amazon.ca apparently already had it. The UK edition is now sold out…

Here’s an interesting new-ish paper on the issue of gender differences in mathematics aptitude: Janet S. Hyde, and Janet E. Mertz. Gender, culture, and mathematics performance. PNAS vol. 106, no. 22, (June 2, 2009). Abstract: Using contemporary data from the U.S. and other nations, we address 3 questions: Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist…

Volker Peckhaus has a new entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia on the influence of Leibniz on the development of logic in the 19th century.

I got Herbert Feigl’s Theorie und Erfahrung in der Physik from the library, and on the front flyleaf there’s a handwritten dedication to Karl Menger that reads “Herrn Professor Menger ergebenst überreicht vom Verf., 13. VI. 1929.”