Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

They’ve been around for a while, but one of the students in my Logical Positivism class made copies of them and passed them out (I suggested they start their final presentations with a joke), which reminded me: Ian Vandewalker‘s “Philosophical Powers” mock action figures of philosophers include four logicians: “Ferocious” Frege (includes Morning Star® and…

Jeremy posted this to FOM yesterday: I’d like to announce a review I have written of two books that deal with logic and foundations in the early twentieth century: Calixto Badesa’s The Birth of Model Theory and Dennis Hesseling’s Gnomes in the Fog. The review, which will appear in the Mathematical Intelligencer, can be found…

If you’re reading Obscure and Confused Ideas or the comments to this post on logicandlanguage.net, then you probably know that Greg Frost-Arnold is working on a book about what went on at Harvard in 1940/41, when Carnap, Quine, and Tarski were hanging out there. While you’re waiting for that book to come out, you could…

2005 is Einstein Year. 2006 will be Gödel Year: on April 28, 2006, Kurt Gödel would have been 100 years old. So next year will be hectic if you want to hit all the Gödel-related events:Gödel’s Philosophy, a session of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, on February 27. Speakers: Juliette Kennedy, Palle Yourgrau,…

I was looking around the Internets for courses in history of logic. I thought something like it would be hard to find–kind of an obscure and specialized topic. But then it turns out that Amsterdam’s ILLC requires such a course (Core Logic), and at Oxford it’s a history option (you can chose between The Rise…

Gillian has already posted about it, but it can’t hurt to point to it again: 2006-2007 MASTER CLASS IN MATHEMATICAL LOGIC In the academic year 2006-2007 a year-long program of courses in Mathematical Logic is organized by MRI (Mathematical Research Institute) in The Netherlands (a cooperation of Dutch Universities). The program is intended for advanced…

I didn’t want to just push Berkeley, so why don’t y’all post your opinions about what other departments and programs would be good places for graduate study for someone interested in logic and philosophy? Anyone from Amsterdam reading this? CMU? Irvine? SFU? It would be interesting to find out about non-English speaking programs, too. Where…

Since application deadlines for graduate school are nearing, I’ll link to my post from last year where I pointed out that it’s indefensible (in my mind, in any case) not to rank the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science at UC Berkeley in the mathematical logic category in the Gourmet Report. I argued…

Via Theorème, (which, by the way, now includes Jacques Dubucs in the list of contributors!) a link to a logic-themed online memory game. According to Theorème, the author is one Nicolas Le Thierry d’Ennequin. Thanks, Nick! Just in case you forgot the rules to Memory: Turn over two cards. If they match, remove them from…

Formal Philosophy, a collection of interviews with 21 logicians and philosophers edited by Vincent Hendricks and John Symons is now available. The website contains a number of interesting excerpts. Interviews with Johan van Benthem, Brian F. Chellas, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Melvin Fitting, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Haim Gaifman, Clark Nøren Glymour, Adolf Grünbaum, Susan Haack, Sven Ove Hansson,…