The Arché/CSMN Graduate Conference: Call for papers

From the 2nd to the 4th of November, Arché and CSMN will be organising a graduate conference at the University of St Andrews, and I've been volunteered to do some of the dirty work together with fellow Archeans Federico Luzzi and Andri Hjálmarsson. As usual, I had no idea about what I'm getting myself into, but now it looks like I'm in for quite a lot of admin work in the upcoming months. However, it's already looking very promising - funding is in place, and we've secured two excellent keynote speakers, Prof. Kit Fine (New York University) and Dr Gabriel Uzquiano (University of Oxford).

Needless to say, I strongly encourage all my postgraduate readers to submit their work.

Check out the details here, and in particular funding info here.

British Logic Colloquium 2007

The British Logic Colloquium 2007 is being held in London from the 6th to the 8th of September. Looking at the invited speakers it's out of question to miss this event. I'm especially looking forward to seeing Volker Halbach and Samson Abramsky - but, needless to say, there is one name which is a sufficient reason alone: lo and behold, Jean-Yves Girard. With a talk entitled 'Truth, modality and intersubjectivity', I'm sure there will be both sensation and scandal.

Here is the full list of invited speakers:

• Samson Abramsky (Oxford University)
  Geometry of Proofs
• Barry Cooper (Leeds University)
  Post's Programme and the Algorithmic Structure of Information: An Update (abstract)
• Anuj Dawar (Cambridge University)
  Preservation Theorems in Finite Model Theory
• Jean-Yves Girard (Marseille University)
  Truth, modality and intersubjectivity
• Rob Goldblatt (Victoria University, Wellington)
  An Admissible-Proposition Semantics for First-Order Modal Logic
• Volker Halbach (Oxford University)
  Axiomatizing Kripke's Theory of Truth
• Wilfrid Hodges (Queen Mary, London)
  Set-theoretic Definability of Constructions - Progress Report on a Disgracefully Old Problem
• Moshe Vardi (Rice University, Houston)
  From Löwenheim to PSL (abstract)
• Frank Wolter (Liverpool University)
• Boris Zilber (Oxford University)

More information about registration etc can be found here.

Harmony and proof-theoretic semantics

Summer in St Andrews - if you thought that meant vacation, you better think again. An endless onslaught of visitors has us all chained to the seminar room. May and June are the months of visitors to Arché, and we've been blessed with many good talks so far. To mention just a few, Robert May, Mark Richard, Jonathan Schaffer, Kent Bach, Paul Pietroski, and, of course, everyone presenting at the adjective workshop. Yet to come this week is Brian Weatherson and François Recanati, and a joint talk with John Hawthorne and our very own Herman Cappelen.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly getting my head over water again after a couple of rough weeks with marking etc. The proof-theoretic semantics workshop was a success and I got some vital feedback on my paper about proof-theoretic harmony. The second draft of the paper is on its way, but for now I've just made available the slides from my presentation.