Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

If you’d rather go to France than Pittsburgh or LA, or you’re not an undergrad student: 21st EUROPEAN SUMMER SCHOOL IN LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION ESSLLI 2009 Bordeaux, July 20-31 2009 The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) is organized every year by the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI) in…

We’re having a little logic conference this weekend in Calgary. If you’re in the area, please come! All talks in 1253 Social Sciences, University of Calgary. Relevant papers may be found by following the links below Nuel Belnap (Pittsburgh) Friday, March 27, 4 pm Truth Values, Neither-True-Nor-False, and Supervaluations My oral remarks are based on…

On Leiter’s blog there was a poll on the question “who’s the most important philosopher of the 20th century”, prompted by the unqualified assertion by Jim Holt in a NYT book review that that would be Wittgenstein. The results were widely debated, e.g., on Crooked Timber. The reason the results were contentious, I think, is…

FOLLI is soliciting nominations for the 2009 Beth Dissertation Prize in Logic, Language, and Information. Since 2002, FoLLI (the European Association for Logic, Language, and Information, www.folli.org) awards the E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize to outstanding dissertations in the fields of Logic, Language, and Information. We invite submissions for the best dissertation which resulted in…

On March 27, 2009, the people behind Language Proof and Logic will have a little meeting on the various courseware packages they have now and are currently developing: Openproof day will be a day of events discussing a variety of topics related to the work of the project, including: * Presentation of existing courseware packages…

Not one but two logic summer schools for undergrads this year: Carnegie Mellon Summer School in Logic and Formal EpistemologyJune 8 to 26, with courses by Steve Awodey (Categories and Structures), Teddy Seidenfeld (Decisions and Games), and Jeremy Avigad (Logic and Formal Verification)Apply by March 15 UCLA Logic Center 2009 Summer School for UndergraduatesJuly 13…

With the kind permission of Brian Leiter, here’s a breakout of the Canadian philosophy departments by specialty according to the 2009 Philosophical Gourmet Report. Major changes over the last (2008-10) edition: The Guelph-Laurier-McMaster program is no longer ranked, and neither is Waterloo. The “local means”, i.e., mean scores from Canadian evaluators, are no longer reported.…

The Conservative government’s budget includes additional funding for Canada’s granting councils to expand their graduate scholarship programs. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada stands to gain an additional $17.5 million, or 500 additional PhD scholarships and 1,000 additional MA scholarships. The catch: SSHRC’s money is earmarked for “business-related degrees”. If you’re Canadian,…

In Krister Segerberg’s modal logic seminar here in Calgary, we were talking about propositional dynamic logic last week. PDL was originally introduced (by Vaughn Pratt in the early 70’s) to reason about programs. In the language, you have propositional variables but then also variables for (indeterministic) programs. Moreover, you have complex terms for programs, e.g.,…

I’m a bit late with this, but if you haven’t heard, here are a couple of interesting new blogs: It’s Only a Theory, a group blog on philosophy of science, including logicians/philosophers of math/historians of analytic philosophy Otávio Bueno, Elaine Landry, and Chris Pincock of (Honest Toil fame) B-log, a “logic-leaning philosophy blog” by JC…