Yearly Archives: 2007
Absolute Generality 10: Expanding background domains
Having tried twice and miserably failed to explain to a sullenly sceptical Hungarian girl that you don’t make an espresso macchiato by filling up the cup to the top with hot milk, I was perhaps not in the optimal mood … Continue reading
Hartley Slater goes off-piste
B. Hartley Slater has a book out, The De-Mathematisation of Logic, collecting together some of his papers. You can in fact download it free by filling in the form here. As you’ll see just from reading the first few pages, … Continue reading
L’Eclisse
It is bad luck to return from blue skies in Milan to a miserably wet and cold Cambridge (it is one of those times when those notices in the Botanical Gardens classifying us as falling into a ‘semi-arid’ region seem … Continue reading
Absolute Generality 9: Restricting quantifiers
Section 3 of Glanzberg’s paper gives an overview of the ways in explicit and common-or-garden-contextual restrictions on quantifiers work (as background to a discussion in later sections about how “background domains” are fixed). This section isn’t intended to be more … Continue reading
Twaddle about religion and science
The Guardian‘s Review of books on a Saturday is always worth reading, and the lead articles can be magnificent. This week, for example, it prints Doris Lessing’s Nobel prize acceptance speech. Still, the reviews do occasionally get me spluttering into … Continue reading
Absolute Generality 8: Glanzberg on contextualism
According to Michael Glanzberg’s “Context and Unrestricted Quantification”, quantifiers always have to be understood as ranging over some contextually given domain; and paradoxes like Russell’s show that, ‘for any given context, there is a distinct context which provides a wider … Continue reading
Absolute Generality again
A while ago I made a start here on blogviewing Absolute Generality, edited by Augustín Rayo and Gabriel Uzquiano (OUP, 2006): but I only had a chance to comment on two papers before the chaos of term and other commitments … Continue reading
Forcing myself back to logic!
Tim Chow has posted a draft “beginner’s guide to forcing“. I very much like these opening remarks: All mathematicians are familiar with the concept of an open research problem. I propose the less familiar concept of an open exposition problem. … Continue reading
Postcard from Milan #3
Continuing to wax lyrical about the food here would quickly get very boring, so I won’t — I’ll just say that if you get a chance to eat at the Trattoria dei Cacciatori, something of a Milanese institution, in old … Continue reading
Postcard from Milan #2
Two of life’s mysteries. Why is it more or less impossible to get a decent cappuccino in England when any Autogrill stop on an Italian motorway can do a brilliant one? And just why is tagliatelle in butter with white … Continue reading