Call for papers: 36th Society for Exact Philosophy meeting

Here's the call for papers for the Society for Exact Philosophy 36th annual meeting. Keynote speakers are George Bealer (Yale), Charles Chihara (Berkeley), and Graeme Forbes (Colorado).

The 36th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy will be held at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyoming. May 13-17, 2008.

Call for Papers

Paper submissions in all areas of analytic philosophy are welcomed. A selection of papers from the conference will be published in a special volume of Synthese, guest edited by Marc Moffett.

Paper submission deadline: January 31st, 2008.

"The SEP is dedicated to providing sustained discussion among researchers who believe that rigorous methods have a place in philosophical investigations." Information on the Society and its previous meetings is on the web at SEP Home.

Submission Instructions

Authors are requested to submit their papers according to the following guidelines: 1) Papers should be prepared for blind refereeing, 2) put into PDF file format, and 3) sent as an email attachment to the address given below -- where 4) the subject line of the submission email should include the key-phrase "SEP submission", and 5) the body text of the email message should constitute a cover page for the submission by including i) return email address, ii) author's name, iii) affiliation, iv) paper title, and v) short abstract.

Electronic submissions should be sent to <sep-conference_AT_phil.ufl.edu>

Nota Bene: All submissions will receive email confirmation of receipt. If your submission does not soon result in such an email confirmation, please send an inquiry either to the above address or to the local organizer.

Length

You should plan on having 40 minutes presentation time. We suppose this to be the principle guide in judging the length of the paper you send. It is the norm at SEP meetings for speakers to present rather than read their papers (and this is a virtue), so it is to be expected that presentation time and page length will only loosely correlate.

That said, do please bear in mind that a referee needs to both grasp the content of your paper and be able to readily envisage how you could present it in the available time. So, if your paper runs long, you might for this reason what to prep a shortened version.

Synthese Annual Conference: Programme

More info about the Synthese Annual Conference is now available. The full programme with abstracts is here. Lots of good speakers: The invited speakers are listed below, the contributed talks can be found in the full programme.

SYNTHESE ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Synthese hosts its first annual conference at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, October 3- 5, 2007. The conference is sponsored by PHIS - The Danish Research School in Philosophy, History of Ideas and History of Science and Springer.

Title / Between Logic and Intuition: David Lewis and the Future of Formal Methods in Philosophy

Abstract / David Lewis is one of the most important figures in contemporary philosophy. His approach balances elegantly between the use of rigorous formal methods and sound philosophical intuitions. The benefit of such an approach is reflected in the substantial impact his philosophical insights have had not only in many core areas of philosophy, but also in neighboring disciplines ranging from computer science to game theory and linguistics. The interplay between logic and intuition to obtain results of both philosophical and interdisciplinary importance makes Lewis' work a prime example of formal philosophy. Lewis' work exemplifies the fruitful interplay between logic and intuition that is central to contemporary philosophy. This conference serves as a tribute to Lewis and as a venue for adressing questions concerning the relationship between logic and philosophical intuition.

This first Synthese Annual Conference is the venue for discussing the future of formal methods in philosophy.

Invited Speakers
John Collins, Alan Hajék, Hannes Leitgeb, Rohit Parikh and L.A. Paul

Program Committee and Conference Chairs
Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks, John Symons (SYNTHESE) and Stig Andur Pedersen (PHIS)

Conference Manager
Pelle Guldborg Hansen

Registration
Please write conference manager Pelle Guldborg Hansen to register:

Department of Philosophy and Science Studies
Roskilde University, P6
P.O. Box 260
DK4000 Roskilde, Denmark
Phone: (+45) 4674 2540
Cell: (+45) 2334 2175
Fax: (+45) 4674 3012
Email: pgh@ruc.dk

A conference fee is to be paid cash upon final registration (Wednesday, October 3, 2007). The conference fee is 150,00 Danish kroner a day, thus participation for the entire duration of the conference (Thursday, October 3 – Saturday 5, 2004) is 450,00 Danish kroner. The conference fee covers the lunches with free beverages, conference booklet, tea and co¤ee during the breaks. NOTICE: Please remember exact amount. Deadline for registration Monday, October 1, 2007. If email is used include ‘SAC 2007’ in the subject entry. All questions pertaining to registration and accommodations should be directed to Pelle Guldborg Hansen.

Conference Website:

http://www.springer.com/west/home/philosophy?SGWID=4-40385-70-35761018-0

PHIBOOK: Yearbook of Philosophical Logic

PHIBOOK: Yearbook of Philosophical Logic is a new initiative from Automatic Press/VIP. The idea is that PHIBOOK will, among other things, publish survey articles in philosophical logic and formal philosophy, and programmatic pieces on future research lines. Sounds like a good idea - especially in new research fields where textbooks have yet to be written, it can be a pain to get a light introduction without having to browse through detailed research papers.

From the webpage:

Aim and Scope

FBOOK is an annual volume devoted to philosophical logic and its relation to philosophy and science with particular emphasis on multi- agent and modal systems, active agency and social software. The yearbook is intended to inform the community of current and future directions of research and activity in philosophical logic, major events, books and important papers of the past year but also leaves extensive room for discussion in terms of columns, opinion pieces, and critical reports.


Editors

• Alexandru Baltag (Oxford)

• Johan van Benthem (Amsterdam / Stanford)

• Branden Fitelson (Berkeley)

• Vincent F. Hendricks (Roskilde)

• Hannes Leitgeb (Bristol)

• Fenrong Liu (Beijing / Amsterdam)

• Eric Pacuit (Stanford)

• Bryan Renne (CUNY)

• John Symons (El Paso)

More info and deadlines for submission here.

• 
  

Corrections for 'An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems'

If you are like me and have bought Peter Smith's book An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems, you might like to know that there is a (short) list of corrections now available from the author's blog.

Philosophy Journal Information

I'm a little bit late in the game here, but I though I'd post this anyway. There is an interesting WIKI called Philosophy Journal Information which should be an excellent tool for research students. The tag line is: "A place for authors, editors, and referees to share information on philosophy journals: their editorial practices, response times, backlogs on publishing, policies on providing comments to authors, etc."

Getting info on where to publish is certainly not easy for PhDs. This could be a good alternative to constantly paying attention to blogo-gossip about journals and editors. The data available on the page is still rather scarce, but with a little bit of work this could turn out to be a great tool. Unfortunately, logic journals don't seem to be listed (it's called Philosophy Journal Information), but you can find both JPL and Synthese (only the latter has received any comments). Of course, since there is an announcement out from ASL saying that they are replacing JPL with the new Review of Symbolic Logic, the fate of JPL is still uncertain.

HT: Aidan (and John Symons if transitive)

Update: Now there is even a link to the page in question.

The Fourth World Congress of Paraconsistency

There is a call for papers out for the upcomimg Fourth World Congress of Paraconsistency in Melbourne (July 13th-18th 2008). The website with registration info etc. can be found here.

[Through PT.]

Papers will be accepted in all areas related to paraconsistency. But we would especially welcome papers on

• Systems of paraconsistent logic
• Inconsistent mathematics
• Paraconsistency and information processing
• Paraconsistency and the philosophy of mathematics
• Paraconsistency and the philosophy of science
• Paraconsistency and the philosophy of logic

We invite submission of an abstract of no more than one page (250 words) by December 15. Email your submission to wcp4-submission@unimelb.edu.au. Text or PDF are preferred formats for submission, MS Word is acceptable. (Make sure your email is no larger than 480KB, as our mail forwarding software rejects large emails.)

Notification of acceptance will be made by February 28.

UNILOG 2007 Report (with pictures)

A couple of days ago I finally made it back to European terra firma after three weeks in China. After losing my passport and visa on the first day, I had plenty of opportunity to see the inside of the Chinese Kafkaesque bureaucracy, an incident that ended with an unexpected extra eight days in Beijing. Now, I tried to photographically document my travel within this bureaucracy, but, as it turned out, this was rather unpopular with the local police. There are pictures of more innocent things, however, and a few of them are displayed below. (When the official pictures from UNILOG are up I will post the link.)

And, as for the daily reports of the conference ongoings, that proved itself to be complicated. In fact, the Chinese has censored my blog. Admittedly, not my blog in particular - any old blog is inaccessible from China. Well, interestingly, Leiter Report was available when I first arrived, but was promptly put down after three days. My guess is that Chinese authorities had a problem with the Leiter Report Chinese Philosophy ranking.

I'll take the opportunity to mention some of the good talks at UNILOG in Xi'an: Vincent Hendricks had a very interesting tutorial on modal operators, featuring insights from his books The Convergence of Scientific Knowledge and Mainstream and Formal Epistemology. He presented modal tools for dealing with some mainstream problems in philosophy, in particular a multi-modal logic with alethic, temporal and epistemic modalities. Peter Schroeder-Heister held a for me long-awaited tutorial on proof-theoretic semantics (something the frequent reader has already been introduced to). Since this is my thesis topic it was invaluable to see one of the foremost experts on the field talk at length about the architecture of the approach, and his own responses to some of the problems haunting it. Some of the material included in his tutorial can be found here. Daniele Porello from University of Genova gave an imaginative formal reinterpretation of Dummett's bottom-up approach to metaphysics (The Logical Basis of Metaphysics) in category theory. Diderik Batens from Ghent University talked about the proof theory of adaptive logics, i.e., logics designed to deal with different non-deductive types of reasoning occurring in the sciences - a sort of follow up from his UNILOG 2005 tutorial on adaptive logics. Amelie Gheerbrant, from the University of Amsterdam, gave an impressive talk on Modal semantics for second-order logic, outlining a semantics not equivalent to standard or Henkin semantics for SOL. Fellow blogger Henri Galinon (Theorem(e)) gave his talk Truth and Inference, which I unfortunately missed - but it was great getting the chance to meet him and, of course, many others.

Heinrich Wansing, Peter Schroeder-Heister trying to sell Daniele Porello a theory.


















Vincent Hendricks (with Erica Calardo) trying to buy jewelry.

















Jan Wolenski displaying the iron fist of model-theory.


















Elia Zardini and Bob Meyer.























Arnold Koslow


















Paul McCallion under the characterstic Chinese banner: "Welcome the Experts of the 2nd World Congress of Universal Logic"

















The Three Wise Men of UNILOG (Koslow, Slater, and Wolenski)


















The Three Wise Men of Beijing Zoo