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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.

Spooky coincidence? I think not

Today in Logic I talked about vagueness and the sorites paradox. Then when I get back to the office, I find that this Saturday, Alan Saunders on The Philosopher’s Zone has a program on — you guessed it — the sorites paradox. Is that a spooky coincidence or what?

No, it’s not spooky. It’s just a coincidence.

Anyway, from the little outline, it’s clear that Saunders has a more adept journalistic sense of what can get a point across than me. His example (is Bruce Willis bald? Peter Garrett definitely is, and Billy Connolly definately isn’t, but what to say of Bruce?) is much nicer than my boring examples of strips of colour shading from red to yellow, or heaps of grains of sand or the other stock philosophical examples…

Regardless, the class had a pretty energetic discussion, from people trying on different responses to the paradox, to other students pushing pretty hard on the “just stop doing logic if it produces problems like this” sort of line. I like these sort of questions — at least if they’re attempts to get to grips with the issues, as they seemed to be to me — because they’re a sign that when you do something like logic, it’s our job to address the philosophical or interpretive issues of what is going on. This is why I like doing the sorites paradox and vagueness around halfway through an intro course, as it gets to the heart of the issue of what we’re doing when we talk about truth values and the machinery of classical propositional logic.

However, after the class, it wasn’t clear to me if I did a very good job of addressing the issues that came up in the discussion. So, my readers, it’s with some trepidation that I’m going to point you to the lectures for the subject. They’re recorded and can be found online (at least, until next year when they’ll be overwritten or archived or somesuch). If you can bear it (and have nothing better to do for 50 minutes or so), take a listen to the March 28 recording here. Here are the disclaimers.

The recording starts with me asking if anyone has a nine volt battery. The wireless microphone was dead, and needed a new battery. A nice person from Teaching Space Services delivered the battery just as the lecture started.
I’m writing on the whiteboard. The people there can see it but you can’t. I wrote down the form of a sorites argument, discussed in the last class (setting a series of colours, each apparently indistinguishable from the next, shading from what looks to red to what looks to yellow), what makes the thing a paradox (the premises seem true and the conclusion seems false and the argument seems valid), and some options for responding to the tension of the paradox.
There are a number of questions from the class (good questions), but they don’t all get picked up from the recording.
I sound terrible but that might just be my reaction to hearing my own voice.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the issue, or if you want to give me some feedback on this class, listen and post here. If you are a 161-115 student (I know some of you read this thing) please feel free to post comments too. I’m up for getting tips on teaching. Especially on dealing with questions from the floor. I wasn’t happy with how I dealt with all of the student questions, so tips and comments will be most helpful.

Posted 08:42 PM on March 28, 2006

Comments

Oh, and we can have a competition to list how many fine philosophical points I ran roughshod over… I can count a larger number than I feel comfortable to mention.

Greg Restall , March 28, 2006 09:24 PM

You seem to have some odd link syntax in your second sentence…

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the stuff on vagueness coming up in John MacFarlane’s class on philosophical logic, which I’m TAing for.

Kenny Easwaran , March 29, 2006 09:20 AM

Thanks, Kenny. The link (and the syntax of the sentence) is fixed.

John does good stuff — his class on this sounds like it would be lots of fun.

Greg Restall , March 29, 2006 09:51 AM

See it figgures that you’d have student’s on your page, or at least think that you have students on your page, as you’ve read Blogs of students for the fact that they’ve mentiond logic.

I must conced though, through alot of my study of Logic I’ve more or less felt that Logic is close to pointless with very little application, but found it always compelling to continue studdying it. The sorites paradox was another of the areas that partly enforced my view of how uttery pointless it was, but at the same time there was somthing about fuzzy logic that really did apeal to me.

However, if logic student’s want to turn back and stop doing logic at the first sign of a paradox, then you’d have to wonder what’s wrong with them.

Sam Rankin , May 17, 2006 10:04 AM