Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Visiting Research Chair in Logic/HPS (2016/17)
Would you like to spend a semester or two in beautiful Calgary, Canada, during the 2016/17 academic year? The University of Calgary is pleased to offer the opportunity for a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Logic or the Philosophy of Science. The visiting researcher will be a part of the Department of Philosophy and collaborate…
-
Git for Philosophers (pt. 1)
What is Git? When software developers work on complex programming projects, they use something called a revision control system. A revision control system allows them to keep track of changes in their code — it stores a history of changes, and allows them to quickly and easily take back (“revert”) changes that turn out to…
-
Open Logic Project
A new open-source advanced logic text, announced earlier this week on the new blog: richardzach.org. Please update your links and subscriptions.
-
Introducing: The Open Logic Project
We’ve kept this on the down-low long enough, I think: together with Aldo Antonelli, Jeremy Avigad, Nicole Wyatt, and Audrey Yap, I’ve been working on an open source advanced logic textbook for a little while; Andy Arana and Gillian Russell are also on the editorial board. It’s far from done; in fact the whole idea…
-
Why Scanlon Left Logic for Political Philosophy
T. M. Scanlon is one of the foremost moral and political philosophers alive. But he started as a logician, working with Benacerraf as an undergraduate at Princeton, Dummett during a Fulbright at Oxford, and Dreben for his Ph.D. at Harvard. His first two papers were: The Consistency of Number Theory Via Herbrand’s Theorem, JSL 38…
-
Pen Maddy: Is Math Mysterious?
They ask, “Is there something mysterious about mathematics?” Among others, Pen Maddy answers. http://ideas.aeon.co/questions/is-there-something-mysterious-about-math
-
Eight Logicians Elected to the American Academy
The American Academy of Arts & of Sciences has announced its 2015 class of members. The recipients of this prestigious honor include eight logicians: Sanjeev Arora (Computer Science, Princeton University) works in complexity theory, and is especially known for his work on probabilistically checkable proofs. He previously won the Gödel Prize for his work on…
-
Anita Burdman Feferman, 1927-2015
Anita Burdman Feferman, the noted biographer of Jean van Heijenoort and Alfred Tarski, died on April 9. She was the author of Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort (Jones and Bartlett, 1993, reprinted as From Trotsky to Gödel, CRC Press, 200) and the co-author of Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (CUP, 2004). …
-
Finding Cheryl’s Birthday with DEMO
Following up on the Dynamic Epistemic Logic treatment of Cheryl’s Birthday Puzzle, Malvin Gattinger (ILLC Amsterdam) has formalized the problem in DEMO_S5, a Dynamic Epistemic Logic model checker written in Haskell by Jan van Eijck (CWI Amsterdam and ILLC). The original DEMO system was described in: Jan van Eijck: “DEMO—a demo of epistemic modelling” In: Johan…
-
Mancosu on Frege and Direction
Remember the part in Frege’s Grundlagen where he starts to talk about abstraction by talking about the direction of lines? Two lines have the same direction if and only if they are parallel; this gives an identity criterion for directions of lines. Ever wondered why Frege starts bringing in geometry? What the historical context and…
Got any book recommendations?