Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Luciano Floridi has been awarded the Barwise Prize in philosophy of computing, given out annually by the APA.

Logic I exercise: Formalize “Every day each of us says the dumbest thing we are going to say that day.” Is it logically true?

The submission deadline for the July conference Computability in Europe is drawing near (Jan 20). I hope there will be at least a few papers on history and philosophy of computability–the PC chair tells me that so far there are none!

Arne Næss has died at the age of 96. He was the last surviving member of the “periphery” of the Vienna Circle. Notice here.

Here’s a more detailed summary of the paper I just mentioned, (Ciabattoni, Galatos, and Terui, From axioms to analytic rules in nonclassical logics, LICS 2008) courtesy of Agata: The paper contains a first step towards the definition of a general procedure to turn Hilbert axioms into analytic structural rules in various formalisms. The result is…

Over lunch the other day, my friend and colleague Agata Ciabattoni told me about her paper at this year’s LICS, “From axioms to analytic rules in nonclassical logics“. In it, she and her co-authors Nikolaos Galatos and Kazushige Terui present an intriguing and very general result: Suppose you have a logic which can be axiomatized…

In addition to the new special issue celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation, Wiley-Blackwell has made the original Dialectica issue in which it appeared freely available. That issue itself was a Festschrift in honour of Paul Bernays’s 70th birthday. (I’m sorry I’m late to herewith commemorate the 120th birthday of Bernays, who was…

Gödel’s paper containing his so-called Dialectica interpretation was published 50 years ago in, well, Dialectica. And so Dialectica has a special issue on Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation, edited by Thomas Strahm. It looks like all the articles are freely available. Here’s (most of) the introduction: Gödel’s famous dialectica paper (1958), entitled ‘Über eine bisher noch nicht…

Shawn beat me to it: Katalin Bimbó, who’s now at the University of Alberta, just published a nice entry on combinatory logic in the SEP.

Via Theorem(e), I’ve come across the webpage of Konrad Zdanowski, a logician at the Polish Academy and Paris 7. His papers (mostly on arithmetic) all look incredibly interesting, he has lecture notes on Peano arithmetic, and there’s also a paper on 2nd order intuitionistic propositional logic, which is somewhat related to my own research. If…