Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

We’re looking for an epistemologist: The Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary invites applications for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor. The position will commence, subject to budgetary approval, on July 1, 2006. A PhD or equivalent, and a strong research and teaching record are required. The area of specialization…

This is scary. Apparently someone in the next building over received a mystery envelope containing a white powder. When I got to campus there were police and hazmat people all over the place: At 11:30 a.m. today the Bio Sciences building was evacuated as a precaution due to a concern involving an envelope sent to…

If you’re reading this on September 19, please click here (courtesy of Samir). It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day! Arr!

Since Greg asked, I thought I’d give a brief survey of many-sided sequent calculi. The basic idea is simple and quite old (the first paper on it, by Kurt Schröter, is from 1955 [8]; the most detailed early papers is [6]). In the standard semantics for classical sequents, Γ ⇒ Δ means that either one…

I know chances are that you’ll be nowhere near southern Alberta in the next several months, but if you are, check out our series of talks. The logic/language highlights this term are Gillian Russell on October 14 on “Truth in virtue of meaning” and a 2-day mini-symposium on logic featuring John Burgess, Kit Fine, and…

The most recent issue of The Journal of Symbolic Logic contains the long-awaited (well, by me) article on “On mathematical instrumentalism” by Patrick Caldon and Aleks Ignjatović. It presents the results from Chapters 2 and 3 of Aleks’s excellent 1990 Berkeley PhD thesis. Here is the abstract: In this paper we devise some technical tools…

The October issue of Synthese, edited by Bernd Buldt, Volker Halbach, and Reinhard Kahle, contains a bunch of exciting papers on Frege and Hilbert: Amending Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, by Fernando Ferreira Real numbers and set theory – Extending the Neo-Fregean Programme Beyond Arithmetic, by Bob Hale Frege’s permutation argument revisited , by Kai Wehmeier…

Every once in a while, I get asked by students with a background in math (usually with an interest in logic) what they should do if they want to get into grad school in philosophy. I know there’s quite a number of accomplished philosophers who started out as math majors and then went on to…

I put up a revised and expanded version of my survey of Hilbert’s Program up on arXiv. If you have comments, you could post them here. You know, try out the whole blogging-revolutionizing-scholarly-communication-etc. thing.

As reported on CT and Cosmic Variance, the preprint archive arXiv has now track-back enabled their entries. This means that if you discuss a paper available on arXiv in your blog and send a trackback ping, the arXiv page of the paper will link back to you post. arXiv is hugely popular in physics, but…