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Showing posts from October, 2010

PhDs in Logic, CFP

17-18 February 2011, PhDs in Logic III, Brussels, Belgium (deadline: 15 November 2010 ) PhDs in Logic is an annual two-day graduate conference and winter school in logic. Each year we invite four established professors to do a tutorial on their work in two one-hour sessions. We also give about ten PhD students the opportunity to do a thirty-minute presentation on (a) their own work or (b) an overview of some topic in their field. The current conference will feature the tutorials by Eric Pacuit (*Epistemic Logic*), Sonja Smets (*Quantum Logic*), Mai Gehrke (*Algebraic Logic*) and Peter Koepke (*Set Theory*). PhD students in logic with a background in philosophy, computer science, or mathematics are the intended audience for these tutorials. They are also the type of students we have in mind for our thirty-minute student sessions. Students interested in doing a talk should send a 500-1000 word abstract to phdsinlogic+abstracts gmail.com by November 15th, 2010. For more information, vis

Busting a myth about Lesniewski and definitions

Some time ago I run into a few logicians chatting at a conference about how Lesniewski formulated the standard theory of definitions. For some reason I felt obliged to say a few words about this. One thing let to another, and this ended up in a footnote to Gupta's entry on definitions at the Stanford Encyclopedia (see footnote three ). A few more coincidences and I started writing a paper about this with Severi Hamari . After a freakish number of revisions (around 20) we finally agreed on a version, and I posted it on academia . Many thanks for their comments to John MacFarlane, Nuel Belnap, Wilfrid Hodges, Paolo Mancosu, Oystein Linnebo and Jan von Plato (I hope I didn't forget anyone). Abstract: A theory of definitions which places the eliminability and conservativeness requirements on definitions is usually called the standard theory. We examine a persistent myth which credits this theory to S. Lesniewski, a Polish logician. After a brief survey of its origins, we show that

History and Philosophy of Computing, Ghent, Nov 7-10, 2011

From 7-10 November 2011 the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science organizes an International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing. AIMS AND SCOPE The computing sciences collect the most diverse complex of experts: philosophers, logicians, historians, mathematicians, computer scientists, programmers, engineers. The number of involved subjects grows accordingly: from foundational issues to their applications; from philosophical questions to problems of realizability and design of specifications; from theoretical studies of computational barriers to the relevance of machines for educational purposes. A historical awareness of the evolution of computing not only helps to clarify the complex structure of the computing sciences, but it also provides an insight in what computing was, is and maybe could be in the future. Philosophy, on the other hand, helps to tackle some of the fundamental problems of computing, going from the limits of the “mathematicizing power of hom