Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Tim Chow has posted a new version of his “Beginner’s guide to forcing” (previously announced here) on arXiv, and points to other introductions to forcing: one by Kenny Easwaran, who’s also posted his “Cheerful introduction to forcing and the continuum hypothesis” on arXiv, and one by Peter Johnson, “Foundations for abstract forcing.” I’m guessing the…

CALL FOR PAPERS 31st International Wittgenstein Symposium 2008 on Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, 10-16 August 2008http://www.alws.at/ INVITED SPEAKERS William Bechtel, Ansgar Beckermann, Johan van Benthem, Alexander Bird, Elke Brendel, Otavio Bueno, John P. Burgess, David Chalmers, Igor Douven, Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth Gemes, Volker Halbach, Stephan…

The ASL Newsletter came in the mail today, so if you’re a member, you should be getting yours about now as well. For the first time in a long while, the election to the ASL council is contested. I’m not going to ask you to vote for me, but you should vote!

From Tim Chow via FOM: I have just completed a first draft of an expository paper on forcing. http://alum.mit.edu/www/tchow/forcing.pdf This paper grew out of a sci.math.research article that I posted back in 2001 entitled “Forcing for dummies”: http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.research/msg/c2d65d1a23eabb66I made a major change, hopefully for the better, by approaching the subject via Boolean-valued models, which I…

I’m on sabbatical next term, and am off to Europe in one week–and it looks like that’s not a day too soon. Teaching modal logic and history of analytic this term was a lot of fun, but I look forward to getting writing done. Don’t have much planned yet, but I’ll be in Toulouse for…

A year and a half ago, Andy Arana and I organized a session at the Pacific APA about logic and philosophy graduate education. One of the panelists was Ted Sider, who spoke about what kinds of logic he thought a philosophy grad student should know. He’s been teaching a course on exactly that, i.e., a…

On FOM, Allen Hazen points to a review in Nature of Reviel Netz and William Noel’s The Archimedes Codex. Here’s Netz’s own report on the relevant part of the palimpsest in which Archimedes comes up with the definition of equality between infinities in terms of a one-to-one correspondence. Also, transcript of Nova segment on the…

Henry Kyburg, Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science at the University of Rochester and an eminent logician and formal epistemologist, passed away on October 30.

This list from Jon Cogburn’s blog is pretty funny. I like the Quine bit particularly.

An addition to the list of programming languages named after logicians (e.g., Gödel, Haskell, Curry): Carnap The Carnap Programming LanguageProcess oriented programming: shared data structures and the concurrent processes that act upon them. Carnap is a general purpose programming language for the next generation of many-core devices, many many-core systems and their applications. It introduces…