Monthly Archives: March 2008

Philosophy of Religion 1: The ability to sin

Posted on March 25, 2008

The first chapter of Murray and Rea’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion is called ‘Attributes of God: independence, goodness and power’. You can get an idea of its style and content from its final paragraph: As the foregoing … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Religion | 1 Comment

Religion and The Philosophy of Religion

Posted on March 25, 2008

I’ve commented here a couple of times about some daft newspapers columns about matters of religion and science (see here and here). And — quite unexpectedly — I’ve found myself contributing a number of responses on religion as a newbie … Continue reading →

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Absolute Generality 21: Parsons on metaphysical realism

Posted on March 23, 2008

It is a pleasure, as always, to turn to a paper by Charles Parsons (a long time ago, his “Frege’s Theory of Numbers” was one of the papers that grabbed me when I very first started philosophy and it helped … Continue reading →

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Absolute Generality 20: Linnebo on sets, properties, etc.

Posted on March 22, 2008

And having said that I would write about Linnebo’s paper next, I find myself rather regretting that promise, and this will have to be a non-comment! Linnebo begins by announcing that the “strongest argument against the coherence of unrestricted generalization” … Continue reading →

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Absolutely Generality again: new readers start here!

Posted on March 21, 2008

Back in December, I was blogging about the Rayo/Uzquiano volume Absolute Generality. Then other things intervened. But it is time, at last, to get back to reading the rest of the volume. So far, I’ve said something about the papers … Continue reading →

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"The Atheist Delusion"?

Posted on March 18, 2008

In the Guardian Review this last weekend, John Gray has a long piece entitled “The Atheist Delusion” in which he lambasts Dennett, Dawkins and the other usual suspects for their simple-mindedness about religion, for their intellectual sloppiness (e.g. the “memes” … Continue reading →

Posted in Religion | 1 Comment

Logical Options, in retrospect

Posted on March 17, 2008

A quick end-of-term report on using Bell, DeVidi and Solomon’s Logical Options as reading for a seminar, in case my experiences with this book are useful to others choosing a text. Background: all our first-year students do a formal logic … Continue reading →

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Phew … the end of another term

Posted on March 13, 2008

Two good seminars yesterday to mark the end of term. First, a small group of survivors staggered to the end of Hodges’s Shorter Model Theory, helped enormously by Nathan Bowler taking us through the final chapter on Morley’s theorem — … Continue reading →

Posted in This and that | 1 Comment

Theories, models and Galois connections

Posted on March 9, 2008

Back in 1969, F. William Lawvere (in his Dialectica paper ‘Adjointness in Foundations’) remarked on what he called “the familiar Galois connection between sets of axioms and classes of models”. But even if it has long been familiar to some … Continue reading →

Posted in Logic | 4 Comments

Job done

Posted on March 3, 2008

I’ve now done the corrections for the second printing of the Gödel book. A slightly disconcerting business as — even on a quick trawl through a few chapters — I found more that I felt needed changing (on top of … Continue reading →

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