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About

I'm Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. [Email: greg at consequently.org; Skype: greg_restall; Post: Department of Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.]

Writing

These are the three last modified entries on my writing page.

“Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity 2008,” an addendum to “Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity,” to appear in Truth and Truth-making, edited by E. J. Lowe and A. Rami, Acumen, 2008. →
[with Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance] Appendix to Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons, Harvard University Press, to appear. →
“Curry’s Revenge: the costs of non-classical solutions to the paradoxes of self-reference,” in The Revenge of the Liar, ed. JC Beall, Oxford University Press, pages 262–271, 2008. →
“Anti-Realist Classical Logic and Realist Mathematics,” under revision. →
“Proof Theory and Meaning: on second order logic,” to appear in the Logica 2007 Yearbook, Filosofia. →

Classes

In Semester 2, which starts on July 31, I’ll be teaching an honours seminar 161-438 Logic and Philosophy, in which we cover proof theory and its applications to semantics.

Events

AAL2007: the annual conference of the Australasian Association for Logic, University of Melbourne November 9 to 11, 2007.

Recent Past

University of Melbourne Philosophy Undergraduate Workshop, University of Melbourne September 21 to 23, 2007.

Logic Colloquium 2007, Wrocław, Poland, July 14-19, 2007.

1st GPMR Workshop on Logic & Semantics on Medieval Logic and Modern Applied Logic, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, on June 28-30, 2007.

Logica 2007, Hejnice Monastery, Czech Republic, 18-22 June 2007.

Heart of Philosophy Café talk and discussion on “What Marx, Freud and Nietzsche have taught me about belief in God”. Tuesday May 8, 7--9pm in the Merrick's General Store.

Oh, and there’s another paper, too

I forgot to mention that I have written another paper recently. It’s a proof theory paper, putting down some thoughts on modal proof theory that I formulated when giving the S5 paper around and about in the last six months or so.

In “Comparing Modal Sequent Systems” I look at different ways to understand modal deduction. In particular, I argue that you can understand labelled proof systems — those in which proofs consist of statements annotated with labels, often thought of as denoting ‘possible worlds’ at least in modal proof theory — can be reconceived in such a way as to not really require talk of worlds. When you play close attention to the kind of work done by the labels, it can be understood instead as a different representation of a structural feature of modal deduction.

The point in this paper is a technical one, but the moral is broader than that. The view I argue for in the ‘Invention’ paper feeds off this kind of point. Properly modal deduction involves doing new things in the structure of argument — you can do a kind of supposing (say, ‘hypothetical’ supposing), which has its own interesting behaviour.

Or so I think, anyway. In this paper I look the issue by way of a comparison between labelled deduction and display logic. Display Logic is maligned for being complicated, but not for failing to be ‘structural.’ No-one accuses Display Logic of importing explicit talk possible worlds into proofs. Labelled deduction is criticised for doing exactly that, but it has nice properties. In the paper, I show how you can get from display logic to Labelled Deduction, and thereby get a new view on labelled modal systems, inheriting some of the structural features of display logic, but which has its own kind of simplicity and charm.

If you’re a logician, I’d love to know what you think of it. Download it from here and leave a comment. I’ve submitted it for presentation at AiML 2006.

Hey. Look at that. Two posts in one day. Even with some philosophico-logical content. I think I can make it three…

Posted 08:28 PM on March 28, 2006