One new item for sale

John McDowell's Mind & World (1994). Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass. & London. (ISBN:0674576101). Eight printing, 2003. Condition is almost like new. Random underlinings on first fifteen pages, then nothing. £24.90 (competetive pricing)

Postscript: there's a short way from McDowell to another Oxford educated philosopher (well, from inconsistency, there's a short way to anything), namely Peter Sullivan. Quote of the week:

"Footnotes? Don't do it. It is a dreadful style of writing - the crab style. Everything we're interested in, is to be found in detachable limbs that we don't know what to make of."

FOM -- Foundations of Mathematics

If you're interested in the foundations of mathematics, check out this page. NYU is maintaining this professional mailing list for philosophers working in the philosophy of mathematics. At the moment, the moderator is Martin Davis. Here's the description from the above page:

The archive is available on the homepage, and is made searchable for everyone. If you want a little sample, you can take a look at an introductory post on vagueness by S. Shapiro.

Danke, Ralf.

You can't beat the system. The system is perfect.

The Philosophy Department in St. Andrews is known for its specialization in philosophy of logic. Not only does the faculty contain major contributors like Crispin Wright, Graham Priest, Stephen Read, Peter Clark and Stewart Shapiro, it is also the home of the Arché Research Centre. In fact, this reputation is exactly my reason for coming here.

No surprise, then, that it was a major disappointment to discover that the M.Litt course anno school year 2005-2006, did not contain a single course in philosophy of logic, logic or philosophy of mathematics. But why? Has the department gone soft? Shifted to the dark side? Is the Moral Philosophy Department winning the eternal struggle against the Department of Logic and Metaphysics? Fortunately, none of the above. With Prof. Wright on "permanent super leave", Read on leave next semester, Priest and Shapiro in their HQs (respectively Melbourne and Ohio) during Candlemas semester and Clark being Head of School, there was just no one around to labour in the salt mines.

Not all of us, however, bought this line of reasoning. Okey, so all the Old Schoolers are busy, but what about the rest of the faculty? Surely, there must be lecturers or postdocs available and interested? Some of the M.Litt students, myself included, have lobbied persistently during the last month, and finally we are seeing the results. Today we received a revised list of next semester's courses, this time including what we all were hoping for: Philosophy of Logic as told by Patrick Greenough.

Here is the course description:

Philosophy of Logic (PY5324)

This module covers foundational issues in the philosophy of logic. Key questions
include: 'Is there a correct logic for natural language?', 'Does indeterminacy
demand a revision of classical logic?', 'Is the world precise or vague?'

Bibliography of Key Texts:

Tim Williamson (1994): Vagueness, London: Routledge
Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith (1994): Vagueness: A Reader, MIT Press.
Stephen Read (1995): Thinking About Logic, Oxford: OUP.
Terence Parsons (1999): Indeterminate Identity, Oxford: OUP.
Scott Soames (1999): Understanding Truth, Oxford: OUP.
Rosanna Keefe (2000): Theories of Vagueness, Cambridge: CUP.
Graham Priest (2001): An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic, Cambridge: CUP.
Roy Sorensen (2001): Vagueness and Contradiction, Oxford: OUP.
JC Beall (ed.) (2003): Liars ands Heaps, Oxford: OUP.

Provisional Course Topics:

Lecture One: Supervaluation, Vagueness, and Incomplete Definitions.
Lecture Two: Epistemicism and Classical Logic.
Lecture Three: The Open Future and Relativism Concerning Truth.
Lecture Four: Truth-Maker Gaps, Vagueness, The Truth-Teller, and Incomplete
Definitions.
Lecture Five: Truth-Maker Gaps, the Open Future, and Incomplete Definitions.
Lecture Six: Indeterminate Identity and Vagueness in the World.
Lecture Seven: The Logic and Semantics of Higher-Order Vagueness.
Lecture Eight: Contextualism and Logic.
Lecture Nine: The Logic of Appearance.
Lecture Ten: Contextualism and Higher-Order Vagueness.
Lecture Eleven: There is No Logic of Natural Language: Nihilism.

So, let me briefly recapitulate in case this story seems a bit unbelievable. 1) We asked for something and 2) we got it. In other words, the system is flawed. Long live the system!

Update

I've recently uploaded a few exclusive pictures from the Raasay Philosophy Camp on my homepage. If any you locals are unhappy with the pictures, please contact the administrator.

I do apologize for the poor quality, but this is due to my ridiculous mobile phone "camera". If you prefer photographies of somewhat higher standard, go here.

Forthcoming from the author of the Bible

It just came to my attention today (I'm probably the last to know as usual - well, at least the last to know who actually cares) that Shapiro has a forthcoming book from OUP called 'Vagueness in Context'. Find more here.

(Once again I manage to sneak advertisement into my blog. Why worry about spam? I spam my own blog.)

Excited, exhausted

A few days of complete circus in the provincial town of St. Andrews. With the paradox and vagueness workshops more or less on the top of each other, the Edgecliff seminar room has proved way to small for the visiting philosophers. Earlier this year we've seen people standing through two-three hours of Zermelo self-evidence, higher-order vagueness, etc., and one poor student passing out because of the heat, pressure and excitement (this actually happened!) during Shapiro's talk. But today it was all topped by none other than A. Varzi, giving his talk in the vagueness workshop. Did we pass the magical number of forty philosophers in one seminar room? Who knows: an openly satisfied Varzi took pictures of his unexpectedly large audience, so at least it didn't bother him.

Varzi's talk was excellent, and those interested in issues concerning supervaluationism, vagueness and validity can find his paper here. Unfortunately, this was the only talk I managed to sit through today, due to pressing exam-relevant reading.

Revenge

Today Arché arranged a workshop on paradoxes, more precisely on revenge. In this context, revenge paradoxes are so-called extended paradoxes, or paradoxes which arise in the solution to a paradox.

Hartry Field and Graham Priest both presented papers on revenge paradoxes. The former's paper plus a paper by JC Beall on the topic of paradoxes are available on Arché Twiki.

Formal philosophy

What to put under the X-mas tree this year? Vincent F. Hendricks' 'Formal Philosophy'. A series of interviews with some of the top people in formal philosophy the last decades, e.g., van Benthem, S. Haack, D. Føllesdal, J. Hintikka, P. Suppes and T. Williamson.

If you want to read some abstracts of the interviews, why don't go here, or maybe, if you want the book in time for christmas, this is where you should go. Mine is already on its way.

(Am I paid to give free advertisment - no. Should I be - yes.)

The Quirks of Inspirational Works

In the murky waters of philosopers' intellectual autobiographies, there are many a strange story about how their ideas were spawned by some accidental event (both trivial and non-trivial) in their life. Just recently, in my Research Method class, I had an inspirational moment. And, no! this is not one of those ironic rantings about how frustrating method class can be - this is serious. Somewhere in the aftermath of my presentation (McDowell and bald naturalism), a quick dialogue took place between a student and our Professor, Peter Sullivan.

Student: "Naturalized logic? How does that work?"
Prof. Sullivan: "It doesn't."

Well, if that isn't inspiration, I don't know what is.

Upcoming talks and workshops

First up is Greg Restall (Melbourne) with a talk on modality, 15th of November. Paper can be found on his webpage, http://consequently.org.

The 17th of November there will also be a paradox workshop about revenge. This will be attended by MIT's Stephen Yablo and NYU's Hartry Field.

18th - 19th November the 5th Vagueness Workshop will be held in St. Andrews. The event features several big names in philosophy of logic:

Achille Varzi (Columbia)
JC Beall (Connecticut University)
Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona)
Graham Priest (Melbourne)
Stewart Shapiro (Ohio State University)
Crispin Wright (St. Andrews)

Find more information on Arché Twiki pages:
http://weka.ucdavis.edu/~ahwiki/bin/view/Arche/WebHome

Zermelo Self-Evident

Prof. Shapiro's talk at the Philosophy Club this Wednesday was, as he himself said, mostly about philosophy of mathematics, "but with thirty seconds of political philosophy at the end". The topic was "We hold these truths to be self-evident: But what do we mean by that?" The first line is probably familiar to my American readers (if any), but for the rest - it is a line from the US Constitution. Thus, political philosophy.

The chief aim of his paper, however, was to elucidate the notion of self-evidence in the foundational project of mathematics. In particular, he presented a study of the notion in Frege and Zermelo. The latter of these is without doubt worth brief mentioning. On Shapiro's account, if a mathematical proposition p (Zermelo's is discussing the Axiom of choice) is unconsciously applied frequently and widely by professional mathematicians, then it is Zermelo self-evident. The notion that is attributed to Zermelo, was supposed to protect the Axiom of Choice from its many critics, who claimed that it was not selv-evident enough (in a non-Zermelo sense) to be an axiom.

The talk provoked a great deal of questions about the epistemic status of Zermelo self-evidence, whether or not such an empirical finding gives evidential warrant. Of course, examples like the theorem of the excluded middle seems to indicate that it is, at least, controversial to grant any epistemic significance to the notion. Furthermore, some of the commentators (among them Prof. Nolan) seemed unimpressed with the interpretational work on Zermelo (there were some translational issues).

At any rate, it was a stimulating paper, and turned out to be the talk with the largest audience so far this year. Prof. Shapiro's paper is not yet availabe online, but as he has promised to make it available, I will hopefully soon be able to give a link to it.