Logic Matters

Some wonderful late summer weather. So much New Zealand, so little time to explore.

The second instalment of my revised comments on Parsons is here.

And the first five episodes of the revised Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears are now online here.

So it isn’t all sun, scenery, and Pinot Noir for me in NZ!

Brian Leiter’s estimable blog has already posted Iain Pears’s terrific essay on the KCL cuts as a sign of the times: The palaeographer and the managers. But if you haven’t read it, do. It is the best single thing I’ve read on the subject. (I was much struck by the reference to Djilas when discussing the rise of the new class of university managers, who have expropriated an extraordinarily rapidly inflating amount of public cash into their own pockets. A blast from the past there for those of us who remember discussing Djilas in left circles decades ago.)

While I’m in Christchurch, we’re having a reading group on Charles Parsons’s Mathematical Thought and Its Objects. I’ve blogged about this challenging book before, when we had a reading group in Cambridge. But, with inspiration from new NZ colleagues and some very helpful emails from Charles Parsons himself, I’m having a bash at rewriting (some of) my earlier notes, and trying to come to a better understanding of both the book and the topics it is discussing.

So, for anyone interested, here’s my revised comments on the first chapter.

I have to start singing for my supper today, and earning my keep as an Erskine Fellow. This  means giving a dozen lectures on Gödel, plus a few talks to various seminars. The Gödel lectures kick off today, and I’ve started updating/extending the notes to accompany the lectures. The notes are now called — perhaps more honestly — Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. The first instalment of the new version can be found here, where further episodes will be posted at the rate of two a week for the next six weeks.

The guidebooks say that the four hour train journey from Christchurch, up through the Southern Alps over Arthur’s Pass and on down to Greymouth is one of the great railway journeys of the world. The guidebooks are right. Especially when the weather is a perfect summer’s day.

Another rainy day   — so we made a first foray to the rather impressive Christchurch Art Gallery.

The building is terrific: it sits handsomely into the surroundings, without shouting its modernity too loudly. And inside it is just wonderfully light and airy.

The contrast with the modern buildings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art couldn’t be greater. Those are just depressingly blocky, and thoroughly unwelcoming: inside the galleries are bleak and barnlike. Here, the curves of the building draw you in and the foyer is a delightful space: and galleries are divided into rooms on a human scale where you want to linger.

There couldn’t be much more contrast between the curating, either. LACMA has some wonderful pictures. But they are, so to speak, just plonked on the walls, in a take-it-leave it spirit, without description or scene-setting or comment. Christchurch of course has to try a whole lot harder, as the collection lacks the Rembrandts and the Picassos. But the result is that it thoughtfully displays what it does have with intelligent and illuminating commentaries. Or it puts together little groupings of old and new, of New Zealanders visiting Europe and Europeans visiting New Zealand, of western-influenced and Maori-influenced in ways that make you look. (Though some of the really contemporary stuff was the usual pseud-ery, worth about twelve seconds contemplation.)

So we’ll certainly be back to do more of the galleries the next wet day: and the restaurant wasn’t bad either!

The view from my office in Christchurch is quite terrific — over the wonderful trees on the campus out towards the Banks Peninsula (I think!). The best office view I’ve had since the long off days in the Hugh Owen Building in Abersytwyth where I had a panoramic view looking over Cardigan Bay.

It’s the beginning of the academic year here, and the campus is overflowing with lost-looking freshers. Somehow they look younger (and seem to be trying less hard to be cool) than their Cambridge equivalents. Almost deserted when we arrived last week,  there’s now a nice buzz about the place.

NZ coffee culture note. More or less every place we’ve drunk coffee so far has had what looks like a proper espresso machine. And suitable tamping and steaming and frothing all seems to be going on. So you take ceremonious delivery of what is supposed to be an espresso macchiato. But not once — yet — have I had anything that would pass muster as even an approximation to what you get in the humblest corner cafe bar in Italy. Very odd. But I’m reliably told that the bar opposite the art gallery does the real thing: so here’s hoping …

A surprising coincidence: Christchurch is 43° 32′ south, Siena (where we’ve spent a lot of time in recent years) is 43° 33′ north. The latitude explains why, when the sun does come out, it is burning hot. But since we’ve been here it has mostly been overcast, and the temperature then drops sharply.

We’ve been consoling ourselves for the lack of summer weather by sampling bottles of Otago Pinot Noir. The local and rather impressive supermarket has some pretty upscale bottles if we can trust these ratings: so far, though, the bottles we’ve tried have been quaffable rather than outstanding — and seemingly all put on the market too young. When I’m feeling zippier, I’ll have to find a wine shop with earlier vintages on sale: but at the moment, we’re still just a touch jet-lagged and slightly weary.

Hence concentration hasn’t been terrific for work. But the last day or so, to get into the swing again, I’ve been re-reading Smullyan’s First-Order Logic. I’ve been struck once more what a fantastic book that is (and three cheers to Dover for republishing it too): if you don’t know it, and are logically inclined, put it on your “must read” list.

There couldn’t be much greater a contrast between LA and Christchurch — and, for us, the differences all favour Christchurch, hands down. It is human-scaled, wonderfully green, relaxed, and somehow comfortingly familiar in its almost-Englishness.

Though there are more than enough small differences to savour. For example, the early settlers obviously didn’t mess about when clearing the native bush. So the great park near the centre of Christchurch could have been transported from an English city, with avenues of planes, and great oaks and limes (and there are mallard ducks on the ponds, and house sparrows hopping around as you sit outside a cafe). But, for all that, as you walk through the shade on a sunny summer’s day, the racket of the cicadas sounds entirely unEnglish.

It is nice, too, to be understood first time in shops and cafes (LA was occasionally  hard work — The Daughter reports the same from Miami, where she has to get her Italian partner to arrange complicated things as the locals find his English a lot easier to understand). And what they say about Kiwi friendliness is all true.

I think I’m really going to enjoy it here.