Political absurdities being worried about. Too many and too depressing to list.
Intro logic text still being worked on. Things have been slow at the CUP end, because the press has been short of production managers. But things are now moving along, with techie/designer checks on the PDF this week, and then at last off to the proof reader soon after. So IFL2 may yet be off my desk before Christmas. I’ve not been complaining about the delay with CUP as it has given me time to read through the book again, change a sentence here and there, and check the end-of-chapter exercises. Also web-pages for the second edition are slowly taking shape here. You’ll now find more of the book’s exercises online with some quite discursive solutions pages, plus a few other materials, as well as the ‘missing’ chapters on truth-trees. The new version of the book, recall, is now natural-deduction based: if you are curious about the particular Fitch-style system I adopt, I link to two pages with diagrammatic versions of the PL and QL rules used in the book.
The Teach Yourself Logic Study Guide still needing revision. This has really had almost no attention for eighteen months though it continues to be much downloaded from here. So an early task as soon as IFL2 really is done and dusted must be to revisit the Guide. One decision I need to make before I do, however, is whether to keep it as One Big PDF, or divide it into a bunch of webpages (if anyone has any ideas on the pros and cons either way, I’d be glad to hear them!).
Category Theory, time to start thinking again! The Gentle Introductionhas also been on the back burner (well, even that is an exaggeration, as it has hardly been simmering away). But I hope to reheat my interest in category theory again after Christmas, and then see what I think about it all, and whether to press on with what was beginning to look like a draft book.
Logic-related books being read. Leon Horsten’s The Metaphysics and Mathematics of Arbitrary Objects has left me completely unconvinced that the project is anything but misguided. Nils Kürbis’s Proof and Falsity, by contrast, so far strikes me as an interesting and well-argued engagement with a set of real issues about proof-based semantics for logic. I’ll try to have more to say about these books in due course (though life is short, and of the making of many books, there is no end).
Wine being drunk. Rather too much, see the first bullet point again.
2 thoughts on “Status report”
David Auerbach
Yes, fine, but did you chose a cover illustration?
What, and spoil the surprise? Well, it should be a Kandinksy (many of his paintings are royalty free, which was a consideration) — though I’ve yet to hear finally whether the designers can work with the choice I agreed with my editor. Watch this space.
Yes, fine, but did you chose a cover illustration?
What, and spoil the surprise? Well, it should be a Kandinksy (many of his paintings are royalty free, which was a consideration) — though I’ve yet to hear finally whether the designers can work with the choice I agreed with my editor. Watch this space.