OK: a review of Maddy’s very engaging recent book (written with Luca Incurvati, which was fun to do) has gone off to Mind. And in the next day or two, I must also put together a review for Phil. Math. of the altogether less engaging Kurt Gödel and the Foundations of Mathematics, which I was rather grumpily posting about here a few weeks ago.
Time then to pause to draw breath for Christmas after a busy/distracting time. But then what’s next, logically speaking?
Well, I plan to blog here in the new year about two more books that I’ve been asked to review together — Leon Horsten’s The Tarskian Turn: Deflationism and Axiomatic Truth and Volker Halbach’s Axiomatic Theories of Truth. Not that I claim any special expertise about their topic: but then both books are written for a reader like me — a philosopher/logician interested in theories of truth, who wants to get a handle on recent some formal developments (to which the respective authors have been notable contributors). Should be very interesting. And since both books have been out for few months, I hope some readers of the blog will be able to chip in helpfully in comments!
But mostly, it will have to be back to Gödel. At the moment, I’m re-writing the opening chapters of the book for the second edition, and I think very much improving them — about which I have mixed feelings! On the one hand, it’s very good to feel the effort of doing a second edition is going to be worth while, but on the other hand, I’m a bit downcast to see how very far from ideal those chapters previously were. Sigh. Anyway, when I’ve got the first tranche of chapters more to my liking, I’ll post them here for comments.
And I’ve one or two other plans too … So watch this space!
I will happily comment on Halbach’s «Axiomatix theories of truth». Unfortunatelty I don’t have a copy of Horsten’s book.
I suppose you can’t post a preliminary version of the review of Pen’s book you and Luca wrote, can you?