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- Want to teach yourself some modal logic/recommend to students? Some suggestions at http://t.co/ZZgu96w7 Suggestions for a better list??? Posted 12 hours ago
- Instalment 2 of my Teach-yourself-logic Guide is online at http://t.co/ZZgu96w7 Comments particularly welcome! Posted 1 day ago
- “@changingspaces_: http://t.co/S6hYoL4l the Hunt & Darton cafe where the cafe is the work of art” But will the macchiato be any good? Posted 6 days ago
Yearly Archives: 2009
The end of civilization as we knew it
Well, that really takes the biscuit. The University Library tea room has stopped using china cup and saucers like a civilized place, and started using disposable paper cups. Ye gods, what is the world coming to? Once upon a time, … Continue reading
Posted in Rants
4 Comments
Entailment – a blast from the past
I promised — foolishly, as I’m quite snowed under with other things too! — to introduce a paper of Neil Tennant’s on entailment and deducibility next week at our logic reading group. So as background I thought it might be … Continue reading
Posted in Logic
3 Comments
The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge, §§3.1-3.2
Hilbert writes Just as the physicist investigates his apparatus … the mathematician has to secure his theorems by a critique of this proofs, and for this he needs proof theory. (p. 61) Indeed: if you are physicist getting surprising results … Continue reading
Posted in Autonomy of Math Knowledge
4 Comments
Nerdy distractions
Moving the blog and other stuff to a new host and getting to know WordPress just a bit has — what a surprise! — taken up too much time. I’ll try to concentrate now on moving more content (leaving theme-fiddling … Continue reading
Posted in This and that
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Work in progress
The plan is to port here the whole old Logic Matters site (including, the pages relating to my recent books and also LaTeX for Logicians) into one better organized, and much-easier-to-update, site. Watch this space. It may take a while … Meanwhile, … Continue reading
Posted in Geek stuff
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Gödel Without Tears — 5
Here now is the fifth episode on the idea of a primitive recursive function. The preamble explains why this matters and where this is going. [As always, I'll be very glad to hear about typos/thinkos.] The previous episodes are available: … Continue reading
Posted in Gödel's theorems
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Ruse gets a beta minus.
Philosophers don’t get asked often enough to write for the newspapers and weeklies: so it is really annoying when an opportunity is wasted on second-rate maunderings. Michael Ruse writes in today’s Guardian on whether there is an “atheist schism”. And … Continue reading
Posted in Rants, Religion
7 Comments
The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge, §§2.3-2.5
To return for a moment the question we left hanging: what is the shape of Hilbert’s “naturalism” according to Franks? Well, Franks in §2.3 thinks that Hilbert’s position can be contrasted with a “Wittgensteinian” naturalism that forecloses global questions of … Continue reading
Posted in Autonomy of Math Knowledge
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The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge, §§2.1-2.2
Hilbert in the 1920s seems pretty confident that classical analysis is in good order. “Mathematicians have pursued to the uttermost the modes of inference that rest on the concept of sets of numbers, and not even the shadow of an … Continue reading
Posted in Autonomy of Math Knowledge
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Gödel Without Tears — 4
Here now is the fourth episode [slightly corrected] which tells you — for those who don’t know — what first-order Peano Arithmetic is (and also what Sigma_1/Pi_1 wffs are). A thrill a minute, really. Done in a bit of a … Continue reading
Posted in Gödel's theorems
2 Comments