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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.

Here in Nancy, Day 2

Nancy Day 2 was a quiet as far as the official program went. Talks were scheduled in the morning leaving the afternoon free. Michael Lynch and I took in the Musée des Beaux-Arts and talked philosophy and much else with Peter van Inwagen, Scott Shalkowski and others into the evening and late in the night.

The morning featured a well-put-together talk by Jonathan Lowe on the contrast between his robust essentialism and conceptualism. For Jonathan, conceptualism collapses into a global anti-realism because it really requires a kind of essentialism about concepts and agents themselves.

I also attended a helpful presentation by Mathieu Marion on game semantics for logic. (For an introduction to game semantics, try the Stanford Encyclopedia entry by Wilfrid Hodges.) Mathieu contrasted the agonistic conception of game semantics according to which the two players (proponent and opponent, or Abelard and Eloise) are competing against one another. He proposed a cooperative understanding in which the players are building something together, like a proof. This strikes me as plausible. The devil, however, is in the detail. The distinctive feature of game semantics is that the proof is not a play of a game, or something you can look back on as having constructed. A proof corresponds to a winning strategy for the proponent, and a refutation corresponds to a winning strategy for the opponent. (Parenthetical remark: Compare this to my comments a few weeks ago on the duality between proofs and counterexamples. Game semantics is an account of proofs and counterexamples. It seems to be interestingly self-dual. I should think more about this… End parenthetical remark.) The issue I find with thinking of game semantics as a cooperative construction of a proof or a refutation is that you don’t get a proof or refutation through a play of the game. You construct a proof (or a refutation) through repeated plays of the game where the opponent (or proponent) tries all possible options and the proponent (or opponent) deals with them all.

That will bear more thinking, and I’ll attempt to do some of that thinking.

For now however, I’ll attend to Day 3. The report on Day 3 will hopefully come today or tomorrow.

Posted 05:29 PM on June 30, 2006