After weeks when the faculty has been almost deserted apart from the admin staff, suddenly there is bustle in the philosophy grad. centre outside my room, and the place is filling up again. It is one of the main delights of being in Cambridge that we have such bright graduate students, and I really rather miss the logicians when they are not around. Sadly, it’s not obvious where the successors of the current crop are going to come from, as none of this year’s M.Phil. intake seems inclined to go in the direction of the serious stuff. But Michael (Potter) and I will try to get a convert or two …
Anyway, this term’s teaching for me ought to be a lot of fun. First year logic lectures (trying to enthuse even the symbol-phobic to work through my intro book); third year Gödel’s Theorems lectures (chatting about themes in my Gödel book); the Math Logic Reading Group (this year is model theory year: we are kicking off with Manzano’s book as revision, then aim to do Hodges’s Shorter Model Theory); Michael and my Logic Seminar (phil. logic this term — Davidson and Dummett revisited); and a handful of modal logic lectures. I can have no complaints about that!
Manzano’s book is outrageously expensive: I just cannot understand OUP’s policy here — why not a print-on-demand paperback for £15 (at least they would sell some!)? But the group is small, there’s a library copy, I have a copy, and there is a xerox machine down the corridor …
We’ll press on a chapter or two more, now we’ve made a start. The book is quite nice in places, but also quite user-unfriendly in others. So I wouldn’t recommend anyone following our example.
Is it not a problem for your reading group that Manzano’s book is ridiculously expensive? Amazon UK has it as 73 pounds! (A Shorter Model Theory is less than half that.)
I think Logic frightens many students in the same way math does (or is it “maths”? Then it would have to be “maths do” I suppose. We Americans don’t speak English so good).
Though, personally, I find the Husserlian approach to logic (e.g., his Formal and Transcendental Logic) less intimidating.