Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A. J. Ayer was born 100 years ago today.

Sad news: With sadness we report the death on October 20 of Herbert Bruce Enderton, who had been battling leukemia for several months. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at UCLA and a former member of the faculties of Mathematics and of Logic and the Methodology of Science at Berkeley. Widely known for his textbooks…

If you’re interested or involved in teaching logic, please consider subitting something to this conference. And if you don’t have anything to submit, keep it in mind for your summer travel plans next year. Spain in June! Third International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic June 1-4 2011, Salamanca, Spain The congress will focus on…

Commenting works again…. There were a lot (and by a lot, I mean thousands!) of spam comments over the summer, which led me to first turn off commenting, and then install a spam filter, which worked so well that it would not accept any comments at all. If fallen back to a simple Captcha. Hope…

I’m supposed to choose a text for my philosophy of language course next term. So far I’ve always used Martinich, but I’m getting bored with it.  Also, of the available options, it seems to be the most expensive one.  I’ve looked at Ludlow’s collection, but that’s maybe a bit too heavy (both literally and figuratively). …

The Kurt Gödel Society is proud to announce the commencement of the second round of the Kurt Gödel Research Prize Fellowships Program. The research fellowship prize program is sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and will offer: two Ph.D. (pre-doctoral) fellowships of EUR 100,000 two post-doctoral fellowships of EUR 100,000 and one unrestricted fellowship of…

The Carnegie Mellon University Department of Philosophy invites applications for the Herbert Simon Fellowship in Scientific Philosophy. We are seeking applications from scholars working in logic or philosophy of mathematics. Any of the following areas are particularly welcome: proof theory, category theory, formal verification, automated reasoning, or history or philosophy of mathematics. The Fellowship is…

Buckwalter and Stich just posted a very interesting survey of results concerning gender differences in answers given to philosophical thought experiments.  That there are such differences is one of the factors considered in explanations of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy — if women have the "wrong" intuitions in these cases more often than men…

My colleague and friend Maggie Osler died yesterday.  She was a wonderful person, and an admirable scholar of early modern science and natural philosophy, the Scientific Revolution, and especially on Boyle, Descartes, Gassendi, and Newton. Her 1994 book Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy is a standard. And I look forward to reading her last…

If you’re here for the philosophy you might not have heard: a few days ago, Vinay Deolalikar of HP Labs has posted a draft paper containing a serious attempt to prove that P ? NP, one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Problems.  The math/theory scene is all aflutter over it. This wiki page collects…