Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Juliette Kennedy‘s entry on Kurt Gödel has just been published in in the Stanford Encyclopedia. (It took a long time to get this done because of all the formulas that needed to be converted into HTML. If you find a mistake, please let Juliette or me know.)

I just noticed that Josh Dever’s Philosophy Family Tree now comes with a little Java applet that gives you a list of your philosophical ancestors (easier to use than the PDF list). Josh, any plans to make the tree capable of dealing with more than one advisor?

I’m giving a talk on Friday for a general audience, and I thought it would be cute to claim in the little blurb about me that I am “probably the only person in the world who holds both undergraduate and doctoral degrees in logic.” Several people have asked me if that’s really true, and now…

Studia Logica is a very good journal, and it should be indexed in ISI. Help us by recommending it! Go here Complete the form using the following data: Journal title: Studia Logica Journal URL: www.StudiaLogica.org Publisher name: Springer Journal Scope: Logic Unique features distinguishing this journal: please write here your opinion in this matter or…

Over dinner yesterday, Jason and I got to talking about Erdős numbers of various people. He didn’t know his, so I looked it up–the Mathematical Reviews database MathSciNet has a “compute collaboration distance” function in the author search. It produces output like this: Jason Stanley coauthored with Richard G. Heck, Jr. MR1234144 (94k:03006) Richard G.…

Agustín Rayo wins over Adam Elga, uses “googol” and a variant of Berry’s paradox in knock-out punch: see here. Dr. Evil clutched his heart as though it had been pierced by an arrow. Trembling, he fell to his knees on the floor of the crowded stuffy room, all eyes watching him. The Mexican Multiplier threw…

Varol Akman kindly sent a link to this picture of the poster advertising the Gödel exhibition in Vienna, with the nice quote: “Today philosophy has arrived, at best, at the point mathematics was at in Babylonian times.”

Unfortunately, only for a talk: this Friday at 4, “Knowledge and Action,” in SS 1253. He hasn’t told us what specifically he will be speaking about, but I’m sure it’s going to be excellent.

My colleague Elizabeth Brake pointed out to me a wonderful passage in the “1706 Preface” to Mary Astell‘s Reflections upon Marriage, in which she’s criticizing William Nicholls’ claim (in The Duty of Inferiors towards their Superiors, in Five Practical Discourses (London 1701), Discourse IV: The Duty of Wives to their Husbands), that women are naturally…

Open Court sent a couple of volumes from their Popular Culture and Philosophy series a few weeks back, but I’ve only now had time to read the intro to Bullshit and Philosophy. It’s about bullshit, in particular, about Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, and it’s edited by Gary Hardcastle and George Reisch. Like I said, I’ve only…