Professional philosophy

In the age of professional philosophy, philosophers need professional tools to communicate with the eachother and the non-philosophical community. The online business of logician and philosopher Vincent Hendricks should be an inspiration to his colleagues. I believe I have never seen a philosopher marketing himself\herself more professional than Prof. Hendricks.

For those unfamiliar with him, he is Editor in Chief of Synthese, currently working at Roskilde University, Denmark, but rumored (unconfirmed) to be a candidate for taking over Hintikka's professorship. He specializes in logic, philosophy of logic and formal epistemology.

Enjoy: http://akira.ruc.dk/~vincent/

Arché seminar in philosophy of mathematics

Good news for those of us who are interested in philosophy of mathematics. The Arché research 'The Logical and Metaphysical Foundations of Classical Mathematics', which normally runs on Mondays, will the three next weeks be moved to Tuesday. This makes it possible for the M.Litt students to participate. Don't miss the 8th of November, when Shapiro is leading the show (on Church's thesis).

The details can be found here:

http://weka.ucdavis.edu/~ahwiki/bin/view/Arche/MathematicsProject

A Face With the Name

Sometimes you just need a face to hinge your frustration to. So I googled after a picture of E. Gettier (seeing that he is causing me great frustration these days). This is what I found. Actually, the picture was a disappointment; I was hoping for something grimmer. However, it wasn't a complete waste, because I found the picture on a page which I can recommend for those with a spare minute. How many philosophers' faces can you name?

http://vernix.org/marcel/people/

Logical Methods in Computer Science

I just received a notification about the first issue of an new open-access journal, called 'Logical Methods in Computer Science. If you're interested, check out the webpage: http://www.lmcs-online.org/index.php.

Here's a brief description of the journal:

"In the first year of its existence, the journal received 75 submissions: 21 were accepted and 22 declined (the rest are still in the editorial process). The first issue is complete, and we anticipate that will be three in all by the end of the calendar year. Our eventual aim is to publish four issues per year. We also publish Special Issues: to date, three are in progress, devoted to selected papers from LICS 2004, CAV 2005 and LICS 2005."

Dana S. Scott (editor-in-chief)
Gordon D. Plotkin and Moshe Y. Vardi (managing editors)
Jiri Adamek (executive editor)

Seriously, Hilary

I've just recently been working on a student presentation on Hilary Putnam's 'Brains in a Vat', and even though I've read it before this is the first time I've paused to appreciate the following sentence:

"It first occured to me [i.e. the argument] when I was thinking about a theorem in modern logic the 'Skolem-Löwenheim Theorem' and I suddenly saw a connection between this theorem and some arguments in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations."

Seriously, Hilary! Those who have read your 'Models and Reality' are aware of the philosophical significance of the theorem, but how on earth can you attribute this discovery to the PU? I am disgusted. I hope I never have to see the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and Wittgenstein's PU mentioned in the same sentence again. Oh no, I did it again!

The Evangelist

As already announced, Prof. Shapiro will arrive in St. Andrews early in November, and already on the 2nd of November he will be joining us in The Philosophy Club. His talk is titled ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident. But what do we mean by that?’ If you're interested, show up at 4.15 pm. For those unable to behold the great Evangelist, I will be back with a brief description after the talk.

The Landsberg Effect

The Department's trip to Raasay has given a complete new meaning to 'that way' in 'that way madness lies'. I seem to remember someone warning us against James Harris' "sunday walk" in the mountains of Skye. At any rate, I for one let the lack of equipment dictate a day in front of the fireplace playing chess. Now, the moral of this story does not become clear before we appreciate the fact that not everyone remembered such a warning. I don't want to quote anyone, but the line "He's probably exaggerating", has an ironic ring to it now that the trip is in the past. Rockclimbing with bare hands, the vertigo of three thousand feet, climbing downards in the darkest night, missing the last ferry home, and supper at 1 am, is a proper description of what these unfortunate sunday hikers had to experience.

As for Crispin Wright, not only can he lie with a straight face (But why would a citizen lie?), he has seen more mountain action than the entire Næss family together. Next time, though, he'll probably go by himself.

And: The Queen is the new King!

PS I'll post some pictures on my web page in the coming days.

Raasay: Reading Weekend 2005

This weekend - friday to monday - the philosophy department is having the annual Reading Weekend, this time on Raasay, a small island on the westcoast of Scotland. So what exactly happens at a reading weekend? Personally, I have no experience with these excursions, but I've been told by reliable sources that it doesn't involve reading. Well, then I'm puzzled: spending three days together with a score of philosophers doesn't exactly spell out excitement, so books would be a natural choice of distraction.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. I've been wrong before and I've learned to appreciate it. Allegedly, the St. Andrews philosophers never spend an entire weekend together without it involving murders. Murders!, you say? Again, I cannot confirm this, but according to my sources there's a strong tradition of playing something called mafia during the reading weekend. Supposedly, this is some sort of roleplaying game where professors and students alike turn into murderous mafia, corrupt cops or lynch-mobbing villagers. Absurd, you say? Well, obviously if you yourself are not a philosopher, it's hard to imagine the scope of madness inherent in this profession.

So now that the rumour is out there, the ever so sedate and peaceful students are thirsting for blood. The Game is on: who will survive, who will win, and, of course, who will bring home the biggest trophy of them all.

Reinventing necessity, part I

Greg Restall's paper discusses the following worry about possibility and possible worlds: if possibility is defined in terms of existence of a possible world, and possible worlds are defined by reference to possible circumstances (that is, as Restall puts it, necessity is the constraint on possible worlds), then we seem caught in an explanatory circle.

Restall himself finds the idea of a primitive grasp of possible worlds bizarre; there is, he says, no "possible-world-o-scope". Thus, seeing that possible worlds makes signigicant contributions to modal logic, it becomes desirable to define them in terms of bare possibility. Then, however, the philosopher concerned about the epistemic status of possibility, receives no help from possible worlds.

Now, the paper aims to show us an alternative modal story - the "anti-realist" story. The anti-realism in this story is of the thin sort. Restall describes, what he takes to be the Dummettian sense of the word, anti-realist semantics as "an account of meaning not in terms of truth conditions." (p. 4, n. 7) The best way to reach such an account, Restall continues, is by replacing model-theory with proof-theory (not unexpected when one considers Restall's earlier publications).

(more to come on this soon...)

The Mother of Necessity

Yesterday Greg Restall published a new paper on his webpage, called 'Invention is the Mother of Necessity'. I can't wait to read the paper, so all course reading will be postponed as of now. But the best news however, Restall will be coming to St. Andrews to read his paper somewhere between the 14th and the 18th of November.

If you want to read the paper, the draft is available here. I also suspect that the title could be alluding to Crispin Wright's paper "Inventing Logical Necessity", in Language, Mind and Logic, ed. J. Butterfield (Cambridge, 1986). But I cannot confirm this yet.

I'll come back with more when I've read through the paper.

McDowell "Can We Conceive Meaning, Understanding, etc. as States of Mind?"

For those of you interested in McDowell's Mind and World (I guess at least some of my fellow students have been infected by the rhetorics of the book), you can find an audio file of a talk by McDowell here.

The talk was given during a Wittgenstein conference in Skjolden, Norway in july. I hope you will enjoy it, I certainly did not.

Courses, curses and the same old chorus

One thing I've always dreaded in a course - and especially in philosophy - is the threat of student domination. Now, there's nothing wrong with students per se - hell, I'm one of them -but when they become many enough to form a flock (some think that when students gather up in sufficient amounts, they are called 'a school of students', like 'a school of fish', but I believe the correct terminology is 'a flock of students' as in 'a flock of hyenas') they become completely unmanageable.

I've seen it before and I'm seeing it again - a course going to wherever courses go when they die a sinful, miserable death without the last rites properly performed. Student presentations, student comments, student objections, student apropos and student malapropos - when it's all over it's time to go home. Let it be said, however, that I'm not blaming the students, when given the chance every young philosophy student has the urge to speak incessantly. This, on the other hand, is no excuse for the lecturers. Pseudo-pedagogical clichés like 'There are no stupid questions', 'Feel free to interrupt if you have any comment' or 'Yes, that's also a way of putting it' facilitates a course structure where most of the time is spend listening to co-students and not to lecturers. A friend once told me a suiting anectode about his high school teacher: when introducing himself to the students he said: "And remember: there are no stupid questions, only stupid people!" That shut them up for months.

Bibliography on logical consequence

In preparation for my M.Litt dissertation I have started to work on a complete bibliography of philosophical work on the concept of logical consequence. I've already got a comprehensive list of references from earlier work on the topic, but after some updating I'll put it out on my webpage. Hopefully, this will later on be accompanied by some of my ongoing work, in particular the paper I'm writing in a course called 'Origins and History of Analytic Philosophy', PY5205 taught by Dr Peter Clark and Professor Stewart Shapiro. If the proposal is accepted, the paper will discuss the historic background of the Tarskian model-theoretic concept of logical consequence, and how some earlier characterization of the concept, e.g. by Hilbert, can be perceived as rivals.

I'll post the link to the dissertation stuff when I finish something.

Administrational note

After a small portion of struggle, I have moved my blog from the hopeless interface of freewebs.com. Even though most of their functions (e.g. homepage creator) are easy to use (that is more or less the only essential criterion for me), space issues made blogging a frustrating affair in their system. So, now I've landed with the safer blogger.com, and I hope they will satisfy my modest demands. (My homepage is still on freewebs.)

"No proof, no buy!"

As it turns out, Schiffer was scheduled for two talks while in St. Andrews. The second one, earlier today, brought up the eternal question - It is, isn't it? - that is, vagueness. After going after Williamson's knowledge = evidence yesterday, he moved on to another topic favoured
by the Oxford philosopher, but this time picked a local opponent. Crispin Wright has
tackled vagueness, as he often tackles philosophical issues, by introducing intuitionism. And even though, as Schiffer put it, the views of Wright and himself are close enough to make
the entire discussion into "a family affair", they sure didn't play softball when it came to the post mortem analysis of Schiffer's talk. I say post mortem, because evidently Schiffer faced some unexpected trouble with one of his claims, all due to PhD student Elia Zardini and Prof. Wright. Your humble blogger cannot reconstruct the entire discussion, but basically it concerned the following argument:

(1) Necessarily, if anyone knows P, then P is definitely true and not P is definitely false, and thus P is not borderline.
(2) Necessarily, if P is borderline, then so is not P.
(3) Therefore, necessarily, if P is borderline, then no one knows either P or not P.
[this is alpha in Schiffer's handout]

The discussion on how to understand the components of this argument, whether
intuitionistic or not, and the expression 'definitely true\false', went on for close to an
hour. However, seeing that the discussion was promptly ended when the room was
invaded by undergraduates eager to start their course, the discussion once again became
an internal matter for the family council.

For those interested in the details of Schiffer's talks, you can find his papers here:

Pictures

On the pictures page you will now find several pictures from the lovely town of St. Andrews (don't say 'town' to the townspeople if you prefer staying out of a debate on whether or not cathedral ruins qualifies as a cathedral and thus renders St. Andrews a city).I am thankful to my neighbour Kristine who has taken (most of) the pictures.Additionally, there are some pictures from UNILOG 2005 in Montreux. The pictures are the anonymous work of participants.

The FIDE World Chess Championship, San Luis 2005

It is not uncommon for logicians to be enthusiastic chess players (take someone like Raymond Smullyan for instance). Should it be the case, however, that you have yet to discover the wonderful world of chess, a good place to develop an interest would be on www.chessbase.com. Downloading the software will enable you, within a few minutes, to play online with players from all over the world - both amateurs and professionals. And the really good news: it's free!*And for those who are already under the spell of the Game, the same software will give you opportunity to watch the chessbase broadcast from the World Chess Championship in San Luis. After #1 ranked, Russian GM Garry Kasparov retired earlier this year, the struggle for the FIDE title has intensified, and the top eight players of the world (excluding Kasparov obviously, and also his countryman Kramnik, who refuse to participate because he is the holder of a rival title) are gathered in Argentina to play a round robin tournament.Currently, five games into the tournament, GM Veselin Topalov is in the lead with 1.5 points. Nothing is decided, however, since there still are nine more playing days left.(*Nothing is free. Although playing as a guest and watching the broadcast is free, playing rated games and chatting is not.)

In the beginning there was nothing

Do not hesitate to congratulate me on opening this blog, though the real achievement, I gather, is actually maintaining it. Be that as it may, without an opening, no blog.