Arché Updates: Professorial Fellows, AHRC Project, etc.

The trading season is moving towards the end, and some of the long awaited shifts in Arché has recently been announced. Firstly, it has just been confirmed that Arché has aquired four new Professorial fellows: Francois Recanati, Jonathan Schaffer, Jason Stanley, and Brian Weatherson. The are all hired for an initial period of five years, and will be in Arché seven weeks of the academic year. In addition, the two present Professorial fellows, Graham Priest and Stewart Shapiro have been contracted for further five years. Needless to say, this will significantly enhance the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics in Arché. Details here.

More good news: Arché has also secured a new major grant from AHRC - this time on the topic Contextualism and Relativism, to be lead by Crispin Wright and Herman Cappelen. The grant, which is close to one million pounds, will among other things be used for new post doc positions and studentships. More information here.

Meanwhile ...

Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen

There's a new translation of a Gentzen biography coming out later this year (so far only available in German). The book is called Logic's Lost Genius: The Life of Gerhard Gentzen and is written by Eckart Menzler-Trott. I don't know of any other Gentzen biography in English, so I'm very much looking forward to reading this. Hopefully, it will help improve Gentzen's standing in the history of logic.

Gerhard Gentzen (1909-1945) is the founder of modern structural proof theory. His lasting methods, rules, and structures resulted not only in the technical mathematical discipline called "proof theory" but also in verification programs that are essential in computer science. The appearance, clarity, and elegance of Gentzen's work on natural deduction, the sequent calculus, and ordinal proof theory continue to be impressive even today.

The present book gives the first comprehensive, detailed, accurate scientific biography expounding the life and work of Gerhard Gentzen, one of our greatest logicians, until his arrest and death in Prague in 1945.

Particular emphasis in the book is put on the conditions of scientific research, in this case mathematical logic, in National Socialist Germany, the ideological fight for "German logic", and their mutual protagonists. Numerous hitherto unpublished sources, family documents, archival material, interviews, and letters, as well as Gentzen's lectures for the mathematical public, make this book an indispensable source of information on this important mathematician, his work, and his time. The volume is completed by two deep substantial essays by Jan von Plato and Craig Smorynski on Gentzen's proof theory; its relation to the ideas of Hilbert, Brouwer, Weyl, and Gödel; and its development up to the present day. Smorynski explains the Hilbert program in more than the usual slogan form and shows why consistency is important. Von Plato shows in detail the benefits of Gentzen's program.

This important book is a self-contained starting point for any work on Gentzen and his logic. The book is accessible to a wide audience with different backgrounds and is suitable for general readers, researchers, students, and teachers.

Conference: Semantics Beyond Set Theory

Below is info for an upcoming conference in Paris, October 25-26, on semantics for natural language. Specifically, the conference invites papers on non-set-theoretic approaches to formal semantics.

Semantics In Paris 2 (SIP2): Semantics Beyond Set Theory

October 25-26, 2007, Paris, France

Call for papers

Since its creation by Cantor 130 years ago, set theory has come to play the role of a lingua franca, both in mathematics and in disciplines that make a strong use of mathematical tools, such as natural language semantics.

While helpful in order to understand a great variety of phenomena, set theory also has certain limitations. Two of them have important consequences for the analysis of natural language.

First, the elements of a set must not be too many, on pain of paradox. Usual model theory is therefore unable to offer a faithful picture of quantification over absolutely everything there is, as in sentences like "Everything is self-identical". This limitation also shows up with plurals: apparently meaningful sentences like "There are some sets such that a set is one of them just in case it is not a member of itself" cannot be adequately represented using sets. Second, by its very nature, set theory is extensional. As such it is ill equipped to deal with intensional phenomena.

These limitations of set theory surface in a variety of domains, among others and non-exhaustively:

- Expressions of togetherness: some advances beyond classical mereology have lead to reconsidering the adequacy of set theoretic notions; for instance, some theoreticians have claimed that expressions of collectivity require the notion of groups as qua objects.
- Expressions of genericity require for their analysis new, non set-theoretic tools, in particular in order to handle exceptions and higher order entities.

- Finally, since events cannot be identified with temporal traces, the analysis of temporal expressions and aspect is likely to go beyond the use of set-theoretic notions.

Proposals for talks may be submitted on all aspects of natural language for which set theory proves its limitations. Works showing the fruitfulness of alternative frameworks (e.g. category theory, linear logic, plural logic) for the analysis of natural language semantics are welcome.

Submission conditions

Abstracts must be anonymous. They should be 2 pages long including references, examples and figures. They should have a 1 inch margin on all four sides and use at least a 12 point font. Files may be in plain text, PDF, RTF or MS Word. Names and affiliations should be indicated in the body of the message. Proposals should be sent at semantics.paris@gmail.com no later than September 1, 2007. Contact semantics.paris@gmail.com for information.

Invited speakers
Peter Simons (Philosophy, University of Leeds)
t.b.a.

This conference is supported by the GDR Semantics & Modelisation (http://semantique.free.fr).

Organizing committee
Alda Mari (IJN, CNRS)
David Nicolas (IJN, CNRS)

Scientific committee:
Claire Beyssade (IJN, CNRS)
Denis Bonnay (DEC, ENS)
Paul Egre (IJN, CNRS)
Brendan Gillon (Linguistics, McGill University)
Alain Lecomte (SFL, Paris 8)
Alda Mari (IJN, CNRS)
David Nicolas (IJN, CNRS)
Gabriel Sandu (IHPST, CNRS)