A voice from the masses

Over at Consequently, Greg Restall has now (partly) fulfilled his promise and given an answer to the first of the questions in Vincent Hendricks and John Symons’ Five questions about Formal Philosophy. Of course, in true philosopher style, Restall makes his own question and answers that in instead.

The questions he was supposed to answer is this: Why were you initially drawn to formal methods? The interesting answer is here. Now we can only hope that the mentor mentioned in the story, Graham Priest, gives his own version.



Categories: Philosophy, Logic

Games and fun

Couldn't resist this one.

Through That Logic Blog.

ESSLLI, yet again

Vienna 2003, Edinburgh 2005, and now Malaga 2006. I've already visited ESSLLI (European Summerschool of Logic, Language and Information) twice before, and, if I'm not mistaken, vowed that last year was the final time. But, alas, yet again I gravitate towards nerd Mecca.

As mentioned, in 2003 the summerschool was held in the beautiful city of Vienna, home of Gödel and Wittgenstein (we even visited Wittgenstein's old house, hoping to buy a kitschy souvenir statue of the philosopher for one of lecturers at home, or at least a T-shirt). But also home of the Habsburg family's architectonic extravagance, the Turk, and the Kunsthistorische Museum. Be warned, however, Vienna during the Dog Days is not for everyone. Classrooms without aircondition and 40 degrees Celcius somewhat diminished the amount of absorbed theorems. Yet, I do not hesitate to recommend this wonderful city. The reason why I bring up the Vienna heat wave is simply anticipating the lectures in Southern Spain, mid-August (!). I must admit that I'm looking forward to the Hemningwayish experience of walking around the Bull fighting arena of Malaga with my ESSLLI-nametag and logic handouts.

Well, anyway. Here's some of the courses offered this year:

• From Syntactic Structures to Logical Semantics (Retoré and Dikovsky)
• Proof Theory and Deep Inference (Guglielmi)
• Proofs, Evidence, Knowledge (Artemov)
• Semantics of Higher-Order Logic (Brown and Benzmueller)
• Proof Nets and the Identity of Proofs (Strassburger)

You can find the entire schedule online here.

New homepage

A new homepage is under construction. I'm leaving the terrible freewebs behind in favour of google's new page creator. Thank you, Google! The page is still rather modest, but I hope to do something with it when the exam period is over.

End of an Era? Kramnik vs. Topalov

Through Chessbase. Breaking news on the chess front: FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has just announced that this September the organization will stage the match of the decade: Vladimir Kramnik (Classical Chess Champion) vs. Veselin Topalov (FIDE World Champion). For thirteen years now - since British GM Nigel Short and Kasparov decided to turn their back on FIDE and play a championship match independently from the organization - the chess society has been divided between two titles. If the match is actually played (don't get your hopes up yet, we've been disappointed before), the title will be unified yet again.

The match is conveniently announced by Ilyumzhinov only weeks before the President election in FIDE. Hm. I say no more. I hope the national organizations won't forget the blunders made by Ilyumzhinov in the past. Interested in the presedential election and its top dogs? Read here.

It is perhaps a bit early to start speculating on the outfall of such a match, but no-one can deny that this past year has been all Topalov's. Kramnik, who has been out due to illness for the last couple of months, hasn't really played any major tournaments, so it's hard to predict if he will find the world champion class which mysteriously won him the title from Kasparov in 2000. My bets are that lightning doesn't strike twice - my bets are on Topalov!

Philosophy is history

Latest from Leiter Reports: Jason Stanley and Leiter are having an intriguing debate on the importance of history in philosophy (or, if you like, history of philosophy). As usual, the accusation is that the ahistorical methods of analytic philosophers the past, say, fifty years, have led to a crisis among today's young philosophers. I think Stanley aptly sums up the appropriate response when he answers: what crisis?

Here is the post by Leiter.

Kasparov on BBC

Talking about chess? I think not. On BBC's Question Time, Kasparov meets up with other experts (I considered putting this in quotation marks) to talk about the politico-economical situation in Russia. I haven't seen the entire thing myself, but it is already clear that Kasparov is advocating some rather harsh opinions about Putin's politics. An aggressive realist on the chess board, Kasparov certainly seems to have adopted the methods that brought him to the top of chess to his new political career.

Through Chessbase.

Gossip from the Gödel Centenary

In addition to his interesting discussion on truth (see below), Dawson gave us the following piece of disturbing news at the Gödel workshop in Edinburgh. In connection with the Gödel Centenary in Vienna this spring, the organizers wanted to make an exhibition about Gödel. One of the items proposed for display was Gödel's original PhD dissertation, which of course contains his historical completeness result. However, as Dawson went on to admit on behalf of the library in Vienna (I can't remember which library however), the original has disappeared! What can one say? Is it an eager undergraduate who forgot to return it; or perhaps some professor or other thought it a nice souvenir from Vienna; no wait, it could be contemporary Hilbertians who have good reason to make the result "vanish".

I propose that the librarians search eBay.