Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Wow. Four students (Sean Geggie, Martin Have, Anders Nissen, Mikkel Vester) at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, constructed a Turing Machine tape read/write assembly in LEGO. This was a final project for the course Embedded Systems – Embodied Agents, taught by Ole Caprani of the LEGO Lab at Aarhus. On their blog Lego of Doom,…

The new journal of the Association for Symbolic Logic, the Review of Symbolic Logic, started up in 2008. Two of the papers in that first volume were selected for the Philosopher’s Annual, vol 28, which each year “attempts to select the ten best papers in philosophy published in each year”. They are: Thomas Forster, The…

In response to the petitions mentioned recently, the UK government has issued an apology. The statement in full, as published on the 10 Downing St website: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A…

Next week it’s back to the classroom for me, and I’m teaching intro logic again. I’ve been thinking a bit about what to do on the first day, especially in the “why you should take this course” department. There’s the obvious reason: it’s required (at least for philosophy and CS majors). So I’m really talking…

Exciting new entry in the SEP on Hermann Weyl, by John Bell.

David Johnston, of the University of Victoria Philosophy Department, has just released three apps for the iPhone (and iPod Touch), which will be of interest to students (and teachers) of introductory logic courses: Logic 100 These utilities for truth-functional logic allow you to check syntax, construct truth tables, and test for consistency and validity. Notation…

As you probably know, logic pioneer Alan Turing invented the Turing machine model of computation, proved the undecidability of the halting problem and (independently of Church) the undecidability of the decision problem, and played an important role in the work at Blechley Park that broke various German ciphers during World War II. He was also…

I had to look up a Russell quote the other day, and that’s when I noticed that many of his books — including the Foundations of Geometry, Our Knowledge of the External World, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Analysis of Mind, Principles of Mathematics, Mysticism and Logic, and Principia Mathematica (annoyingly, only vol. II) — are…

Here’s another article in the “you might not have thought it but philosophy undergrads are actually doing well in careers in business and law” mold, from a Canadian perspective. Philosophy’s makeover: Why job prospects for philosophy grads are brightening, by Daniel Drolet

Ah, if it only were that simple: