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Bleg: Short Video Lectures by Philosophers
Our friend Ted Shear (Queensland) is hoping to organize a collection of short video lectures by philosophers aimed at a general audience. This seems like a great idea, and if you’re at all interested, read on. UPDATE: We want to make it very clear that an important part of this project will to be to keep […]
Teaching as a Grad Student: Logic Week One
January 22, 2017
I have just started teaching my first course as instructor of record (i.e. I’m lecturing, not TAing), and I thought that this would be a good opportunity to start an occasional series on teaching as a graduate student. What follows are my thoughts after finishing my first (and now second) week of teaching. I plan […]
More About Forallx: Calgary Remix
January 18, 2017
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The Winter 2017 edition of Forallx: Calgary remix has been out for a few weeks. Indeed, I’ve started teaching from it. Richard Zach has blogged about our progress here. Later this week I’ll be posting about my experience getting ready to teach “Logic I” for the first time, so stay tuned! (Photo credit: Richard […]
Call for Applications: Summer School on Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students
December 23, 2016
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I was reminded by Alison’s post yesterday, that the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) has recently put out their call for applications for their summer school for women. It is the fourth iteration of this summer school, and this year’s lecturers are a veritable who’s who of mathematical philosophy. Applications are due March 5th, […]
Direct Democracy
November 21, 2016
I was visiting friends in northern California during the US election, and although I have thoughts and opinions about Trump, US politics and the electoral college, I’m going to put those issues aside. Instead I would like to share my experience with the ballot propositions in California (I’m from NY, so I have little experience […]
An Open Source Logic Text
October 18, 2016
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The Open Logic Project, initiated by my supervisor, Richard Zach, is a project to produce a comprehensive free and open source intermediate logic text. More recently, Richard and I have been putting together a Calgary remix of forallx, a free and open source text for introductory logic, originally written by PD Magnus. Below is the […]
Political Possibilities.
August 22, 2016
With the political turmoil in the US and UK this year, there has been a lot of discussion of the relative merits of democratic forms of government and alternatives (e.g. here and here). Many of the proposed changes seem to me to be unworkable, but others, like a move away from first past the post […]
Grinworthy Quotes (12)
July 24, 2016
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Here’s W. V. O. Quine discussing the fact that Frege didn’t adopt a type theoretic approach (like Russell and Whitehead’s) when faced with Russell’s paradox. Actually, it is not to be wondered that Frege did not think of this course, or, thinking of it, adopt it. It was by having all his classes at ground […]
An Unusual Worry About Jargon.
May 16, 2016
I was often told, especially earlier in my education, to avoid excessive use of jargon. More generally, we as philosophers are accused of writing articles that are difficult to understand, at least in part because of our use of jargon. I do think that we should be careful about the overuse of technical terminology, especially […]
CfP: Graduate Conference on Logic and Language at UoC
November 17, 2015
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5th Annual Graduate Conference: Logic & Language Department of Philosophy University of Calgary May 27–28, 2016 The theme of the 2016 University of Calgary Graduate Philosophy Conference will be Logic and Language. Topics at the intersection of philosophy of language and (philosophy of) logic have a long and fruitful history, and continue to be at […]
Grinworthy Quotes (11)
November 16, 2015
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Here are the final three sentences of Alberto Coffa’s “Kant, Bolzano, and the Emergence of Logicism” (Journal of Philosophy, 74, 1982, p. 689): When concepts were finally wedded to the word, a priori knowledge turned from true in virtue of concepts to true in virtue of meanings—as Carnap put it—or true ex vi terminorum—as Wilfred […]
Grinworthy Quotes (10)
November 5, 2015
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Here’s other amusing line from Paul Benacerraf’s dissertation (Princeton, 1960, p. 182): It was in fact through [Cantor’s] interest in the infinite and in infinite numbers that he developed the theory of sets. The purpose was to make an honest woman of the infinite, a task held by most mathematicians of his time to be […]
Grinworthy Quotes (9)
October 8, 2015
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I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these — I’ve been reading some fairly dry material recently. The following quote is at the very beginning of Paul Benacerraf’s unpublished PhD dissertation (Princeton, 1960) which I’m reading as part of my dissertation research. The quote is attributed to an unnamed undergraduate student. […]
On Sustaining Life.
June 15, 2015
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This past weekend, the philosophy department here at the University of Calgary hosted a conference on Sustainability with a focus on intergenerational justice. A topic of much debate was what exactly should be sustained/left for future generations. Now, I am very much an outsider to this debate, but one candidate of a necessary (but insufficient) […]
Grinworthy Quotes (8)
June 5, 2015
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Here is another quote from John Burgess, this time from his book Fixing Frege (Princeton University Press: 2005). Anyone who reads logic/mathematics/philosophy of mathematics will have come across the phenomenon he’s talking about. Now it is a common mathematical practice, called “abuse of language,” to omit to distinguish notationally between items that are distinct notionally, […]
Hashtag_Octothorpe
April 26, 2015
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A while back I was reading a paper by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, first published in 2000 [1], in which they use the symbol “#” to denote an arbitrary matrix sentence. That was over half a decade before twitter went live. That symbol, variously known as the hash sign/symbol, the number sign, or octothorpe […]
APA/BPA Journal Survey
March 18, 2015
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The APA and the BPA have just published the results of their joint philosophy journal survey here, and here (respectively). Data includes number of submissions, acceptance rates, time to publication, percent female authors, and a few other things. I have only had a quick look through the data, and I’m sure someone will do a […]
Grinworthy Quotes (7)
March 14, 2015
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Here is John Burgess’s amusing description of Quine’s view of mathematical ontology as motivated by the indispensability argument, from “Mathematics and the Bleak House” (Phil. Math. 12, 2004). Quine…urged a very different sort of reason for accepting the existence of numbers (or other abstract mathematical entities to which numbers could be “reduced”). According to Quine, […]
Playing Outside Your Wheelhouse
February 2, 2015
Anyone who has been following the Grinworthy Quotes series here on A Philosopher’s Take will likely have noticed that I’ve been reading a fair amount of medieval philosophy recently. Some readers may also be aware that I usually work on philosophy of mathematics, logic and metaphysics. In working on medieval philosophy, and in particular medieval […]
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A Philosopher's Take 
January 23, 2017
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