LoPSE

Recently my favorite method of procrastination involved reading Philosophical Tales: Being an Alternative History Revealing the Characters, the Plots, and the Hidden Scenes That Make Up the True story of Philosophy . Even if not always charitable and not always historically adequate, it's quite amusing. Below, some fragments that I find entertaining (the selection is slightly random, though): Thomas Aquinas was very overweight, suffered from dropsy, and had one large eye and one small eye which made him look lopsided. As a child he was silent most of the time and, when he did speak, it was often unrelated to the conversation. So, he decided to become a philosopher-monk. And, as such, he was very successful. After he [Aquinas] drove away the temptress, two angels came to him and fastened a chastity belt around his waist.” Or so at least embellishes our other theological expert at Trinity Communications on the Internet, along with advice to readers to “Buy or fashion your own chastit...

Through Philos-L I've learned that the new series of Miscellanea Logica is out - for a while I though the enterprise was pretty much dead, but the new series is up and running, chief-edited by Jaroslav Peregrin , a cool logician, known also to some as the - brilliant - logician - who - made - us - make - unintended - loops - on - an - otherwise - marvelous - hike - in - Czech - mountains - in 2007 - nevertheless ("hey, haven't we passed by that tree-cutting machine some time ago?" - "No, there's plenty of those around here" - "all of them with a blue blouse inside and this sticker?") ... anyway, I see that the new series is available online for free! HERE ! Check it out. :)

Recently, I've been playing around with Mendeley , a pdf file manager. It does have some very neat features: it allows one to catalogue their pdf files in one database, it keeps a copy of the catalogue (and files, up to 500 MB) online, it inludes an internal pdf browser and provides nice search & filtering options, it allows one to share groups of pdfs with up to 10 other people; it is also possible to comment on pdfs and share those comments as well. Another nice feature is that the package includes a file manager which (if you want) can organize copies of imported files, so that you end up with one organized folder with all your pdfs and positions in your catalogue are linked to them. You can also decide to generate a bibtex file (or bibtex files) as you go, if you like to use LaTeX. When you add files, you can automatically do a google scholar search for file details, it works pretty well. Overall, I think the authors have done a pretty good job. I decided to import all my p...

It’s been a while since I posted anything. Mostly this is because life has been pretty hectic lately. In September we spent a few weeks in Gdańsk, but now we’re moving every few weeks between various places in the UK, visiting different universities and trying to get some research done meanwhile. This semester I’m mostly based in Bristol as a British Academy Visiting Fellow, working with Oystein Linnebo on the dynamic approach to abstraction principles, and doing some directed reading (on groundedness with Hannes Leitgeb and on axiomatic theories of truth with Leon Horsten ). These days, however, we’re hanging out in Scotland, currently visiting Arche Research Centre in St. Andrews, taking off for a few other places tomorrow. I gave a talk here on Tuesday about nominalistic approaches to neologicism, and decided to stick around for the Arche/CSMN graduate conference . Today, I managed to catch a talk by Ernest Lepore followed by an interesting talk about counterfactuals by Daniel B...