Two more books from the CUP sale. One is David Wills’ Jean-Luc Godard: Pierrot le Fou in the Cambridge Film Handbooks series, which should be a fun read. Shame that there are no colour stills suggesting the amazingly vibrant look of the thing: but since I only paid £3 I really can’t complain. I’m sure that I never even a quarter understood the film, and I’ve not seen it for many years: but I’ve always remembered it as terrific.
The other purchase is Joyal and Moerdik’s Algebraic Set Theory. Frankly, I bought that more in ambitious hope than in any firm belief that I’ll get my head around it, as my category theory is fragmentary and fragile. But I’ll give it a shot.
Not soon, though, as this term is model-theory term: as I’ve mentioned before, Thomas Forster and I are going to be running a reading group for a mixed bunch, to work through Hodges’s Shorter Model Theory. I’m going to be doing some more much needed background homework/revision over the next week, and at the moment I’m working through some of Chang and Keisler. Incidentally, that’s surely another candidate for a Dover reprint: even though in some ways it isn’t fantastically well written, and so the authors don’t always make the reader’s job a comfortable one, I guess it is still a rightly classic treatment.
Well, I’ve not (yet) used Hodges’ book in classes or a reading group, so I don’t (yet) know how it works as a higher-level intro to model theory. But it is certainly much more than a reader of my Gödel book needs, which is no more than a middle level logic course. For that, you could try Hodges’ ‘Elementary predicate logic’, chapter in Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. I, ed. D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner, Reidel, Dordrecht 1983, pp. 1-131. Revised second edition, Kluwer, Dordrecht 2001, pp. 1-129. But even Bostock’s Intermediate Logic should give more than enough background to tackle my Gödel book. Or at least, that was certainly my intention!
Can you recommend the Hodges? I bought your book to get a better understanding of the fundamental ideas behind Godel, but I’m still struggling with those, for reasons mentioned in earlier comments on this blog. Would Hodges help?