Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Sorry for dropping the ball on the LC’05 conference reporting. Day 5 was when I had my talk, so it was a little hectic, and then after my talk they had already turned off the wireless ethernet and locked the computer lab. Now, of course, I don’t remember what happened. Oh well.

Greg Restall is way more dedicated and wired than I am. He already has two posts about what’s happening at the Logic Colloquium, and I just made it up the hill in the midday sun. I am so glad I didn’t pack my computer. So thank you, Greg, for blogging from the Logic Colloquium, so…

Games in logic are incredibly fashionable, and there’s lots of exciting work that I could write about. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll give you an exercise that can be solved with just the very basics of logic. A finite game is a subset W ⊆ M1, …, Mn, where each Mi is a finite set.…

Wow, it’s just raining Gödel references. The latest issue of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic is all about Gödel, with exciting-sounding titles like “Future tasks for Gödel scholars” (John W. Dawson, Jr. and Cheryl A. Dawson), “On Gödel’s way in: the influence of Rudolf Carnap” (Warren Goldfarb), and “Gödel’s reformulation of Gentzen’s first consistency proof…

If you happen to be in or near Vienna, there’s a little workshop at the TU Wien, Monday to Wednesday of next week, sponsored by the Gödel Society. It’s on cut-elimination; speakers include Lev Beklemishev, Ale Carbone, Grigori Mints, Pavel Pudlák, and Helmut Schwichtenberg as well as a bunch of up-and-coming young logicians like Arnold…

Don’t you wish someone would write a book that catalogs all the various ways in which one can misstate, misunderstand, and misapply Gödel’s theorems, and how to correct such misunderstandings? A book that you can send your students off to read when they say stuff like, “Gödel showed that there is no mathematical truth,” or…

Christos Papadimitriou has a novel called Turing (A Novel About Computation). (He also has a few other excellent textbooks on technical stuff, but y’all know that.) I didn’t know about the novel before, and so when I went to the MIT Press website, I noticed that it’s on sale! Only 9 bucks (US) for the…

I’m re-reading Coffa’s The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap in preparation for my course on the Vienna Circle, and was struck by this quote on p. 14: With his characteristic blend of genius and insanity, Leibniz had conceived of a project in which the simple constituents of concepts would be represented by prime numbers…

Well, I spent the last 2 weeks finishing a paper and cleaning house, and now I’m in Vienna and jetlagged. But I got all my library cards in order and checked out some books. Now all I need is some sleep, setting up some kind of internet access at home, and I’ll be back to…

There’s a link on OPP to Chris Pincock’s new paper A Role for Mathematics in the Physical Sciences (forthcoming in Nous), so I thought I’d draw everyone’s attention (well, the attention of the handful of people reading this) to Chris’s other work, all very good, available on his website.