Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

2nd World Congress and School on Universal LogicCall for papersXi’an, China, August 16-22, 2007 This event is the second in a series of events whose objective is to gather logicians from all orientations (philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, artificial intelligence etc) – people not focusing only on some specific systems of logic or some particular…

The Department of Mathematics of the Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD) invites applications for a Juniorprofessorship in Mathematics – Applied Logic (W1 B BesG) to be filled 1.4.2007. Applicants must be qualified in Applied Logic. Applications from candidates working in “Mathematical Proof Theory” (e.g. proof mining, proofs as programs, reverse mathematics, constructive formal systems) and/or…

table.lines td { vertical-align: top; border: 1px dashed gray; empty-cells: show; padding: 2pxWith the kind permission of Brian Leiter, here’s a breakout of the Canadian philosophy departments by specialty according to the Philosophical Gourmet Report 2006-08. The same programs are ranked in 2006-08 as in the 2004-06 edition. This year, only the rank ordering of…

I just spent a wonderful week in Kyoto at the invitation of Susumu Hayashi. Susumu’s been working on Hilbert’s notebooks, and he, Mariko Yasugi, Wilfried Sieg, Koji Nagatogawa, and I have had several days of interesting discussions about them. The last two days there was a workshop on Hilbert and computability, and it was a…

Julian Henkin sent me the link to Berkeley’s obituary of Leon Henkin.

I just heard that Leon Henkin passed away earlier this week. He was a terrific logician and a terrific teacher. He will be missed.

Ok, this is hopefully my last paper ever on many-valued logics. Well, maybe not. In any case, it’s done and will come out in APAL.

In an interesting thread titled “Recursive” on FOM last week there was a discussion on the history of primitive recursive functions. Of course, already Grassmann, Dedekind, and Peano gave primitive recursive definitions of individual functions such as addition and multiplication, and Skolem’s 1923 article

I was asked in email about a good source about Goodstein sequences and the independence of Goodstein’s Theorem from Peano Arithmetic. The independence result is due to Kirby and Paris in a 1983 paper in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (vol. 14), using the method of indicators. Georg Moser suggested the following paper…

I’m going to be teaching philosophy of language next term. It’s the first time–if you can believe that–we’re offering a course with that title. We used to have a course called “Analytical Philosophy”, which served that purpose, but it was also a history of analytic philosophy course. Anyway. I’d like to give my students a…