Elisabeth Brauß at Wigmore Hall
The extraordinary Elisabeth Brauß played again last night at Wigmore Hall, to the warmest of receptions. The concert last night was live-streamed, and is available to watch for 90 days here. In an engagingly varied programme she offered us some rarely performed Hindemith, Brahms’ late four Klavierstücke, and Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien, all done with such verve and then wonderful delicacy, as variously called for — just a delight.
But the recital started Beethoven’s Op. 109 Sonata, which inspired Elisabeth to quite mesmerising playing with heart-stopping moments: transcendental music, and a performance to more than stand comparison with the very best I’ve heard. Extraordinary, as I say.
I have been reading Proofs & Theories. This is not a weighty logical tome, but the (oddly titled?) very slim volume of short essays and occasional pieces by Louise Glück.
Have I mentioned here Akihiro Kanamori’s relatively recent book 
I can hardly complain about people adding unnecessarily to the over-supply of introductory logic books, having done it myself. But here’s yet another one, Logic Works: A Rigorous Introduction to Formal Logic by Lorne Falkenstein, Scott Stapleford and Molly Kao (published just six months ago by Routledge). I’ve been asked what I think of it. Having now taken a look at the book, I’ll save you the trouble of doing the same. It’s pretty bad. Not that I’ve struggled through all 645 pages. But you’ll forgive me that: life is short and patience limited.
There’s a new book out by Owen Griffiths and Alex Paseau, One True Logic: A Monist Manifesto (OUP). As the title suggests, this argues against logical pluralism. Yes, of course, there are myriad logical systems which we can concoct and study as interesting mathematical objects. But what about the logic we actually use in reasoning about them and about other mathematical matters? Is there in fact one correct logic which tracks what really does follow from what? Our authors take a conservative line, in that they are anti-pluralist: there is indeed one true logic for in-earnest applications. They are unconservative in defending a highly infinitary logic in that role.
For over ten years, Raymond Geuss and I were both members of the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty. But apart from one year when, like two unbelieving bishops, we had to co-examine a metaphysics paper, I doubt we spoke more than a few hundred words. I suspect he thought I was simply an uninteresting unphilosophical philistine. In fact, we might have had just a little more in common than he suspected, apart from contrarian tendencies — stretching from being both brought up as Catholics to both being amused by the racier ancient Greek epigrams (indeed the first things I ever read by him were his versions in his Parrots, Poets, Philosophers and Good Advice).
