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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.

Horn tooting

Two bits of horn tooting for today:

First, from the famous and notorious Philosophical Gourmet Report. Brian Leiter pointed out that the report hit the newspaper here in Australia. The point of the little note in the Higher Education section of The Australian was that the ANU topped the rankings of Australian philosophy departments (as it has in the past), over Sydney and Melbourne.

Curiously the article picks out discipline specific areas where Melbourne scored higher than ANU (Applied Ethics) and where ANU scored higher (Metaphysics). You wouldn’t be surprised that Melbourne did well in Applied Ethics, since we have a centre devoted to it, and there are lots of good things going on in the field. We ranked very well internationally in that area (we end up in the cohort of the top 7-18 departments in the survey). What The Australian’s report didn’t mention was that Melbourne also scored respectably well in Philosophical Logic. (Here, we’re in the cohort of the top 5-12.) I suppose one salient difference is that in philosophical logic, we don’t have a named centre: we just a few people who do it.

Here’s the second bit of shameless self-promotion concerning logic at Melbourne: You might have heard about the process of institutional change taking place at this University. One part of this is the introduction of new undergraduate degrees. One part of this is the development of new ‘breadth’ subjects, to teach material to students across the university system: I’ve been working with colleagues on a proposal to teach a new first-year undergraduate unit “Logic: Language & Information,” collaboratively between philosophy, computer science, linguistics, mathematics and electrical & electronic engineering. The idea is that we teach propositional and predicate logic with lots of different applications in the related fields. It’s been a bit of a tricky process, but now that it’s all come together, the thing looks like it might fly. With such interesting people here like Greg Hjorth, Jen Davoren, Steven Bird and Lesley Stirling, we can teach a pretty good course on logic & language.

If you know of any places where a serious introductory formal logic subject is taught in such an interdisciplinary way, can you let me know in the comments to this entry? It’ll help to get some comparisons when we thrash through the detail of the syllabus.

Posted 11:36 AM on November 15, 2006

Comments

Most handbooks on propositional and first order logic miss one important thing: the means for the reader/user to check whether he has done the exercises right. But, of course, an interdisciplinary approach is also something necessary.

Tony Marmo , November 16, 2006 06:39 AM

It sounds like the program that is starting at your university is similar to the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford. That major is an interdisciplinary one cutting across the same areas as the major you mentioned. The intro/upper-intro logic classes there are largely aimed at people who are taking classes in all those fields. The books they used when I took the classes as an undergrad were Barwise and Etchemendy’s Language, Proof and Logic and Enderton’s Intro to Logic. The people involved with that program would probably be good to contact. Tom Wasow and Marc Pauly are teaching the logic classes this year I believe. Etchemendy hasn’t taught recently. The program’s URL is http://symsys.stanford.edu . Hope that helps!

Shawn Standefer , November 17, 2006 08:03 AM

Thanks, Shawn, that’s really helpful.

Symbolic Systems at Stanford was one program I had in mind to look at, but your specific pointer to people who teach the intro classes are helpful. We’re working on a much smaller scale (we’re not doing a complete major, just a broad introductory subject), but it’s good to keep in mind where things could go…

Greg Restall , November 17, 2006 08:10 AM

Professor Restall, Another possibility would be to contact some of the logic people at Carnegie Mellon. I don’t think they are as focused on the linguistics side of things, but their courses seem to be geared towards encompassing philosophy, math, CS, and EE. Jeremy Avigad would probably be a good person to contact. I’m taking a class from him and he certainly speaks to the different interests you mentioned.

Shawn Standefer , November 17, 2006 09:18 AM

Last year, I taught a course on formal and computational semantics to second year linguistics students (Utrecht University) with no background in logic or computer science using the course book of Blackburn and Bos (http://www.blackburnbos.org/), an introduction to computational semantics.

Although I needed to provide additional background in propositional logic and logic programming for this group of students, the book integrates logical and computational perspectives on natural language analysis very intuitively.

Willemijn Vermaat , November 21, 2006 12:27 PM

I understand that the University of Auckland requires all undergraduate students to take a course in the Arts Faculty. As a result of this rule, large numbers of science students take introductory logic, offered by the Philosophy Department, and enrolments in the course are regularly in the high 3 or even 4 figures. Many of these students continue with logic into their second and third years, no doubt ensuring the continuation of New Zealand’s disproportionate global dominance of formal logic. The person to ask about this is Rod Girle, whom I believe created the course.

Peter McB. , November 22, 2006 09:15 AM

Thanks, Willemijn, and Peter.

That’s all helpful stuff. I’ve talked with Rod about logic teaching. (I’ve taught an ancestor of the course he teaches in Auckland, when he was on leave from the University of Queensland, when I was a PhD student there.)

Rod’s course has influenced what I teach, rather a great deal. It’s not as interdisciplinary as we’re planning, but it’ll be important to keep his model in mind if we end up having large classes…

Greg Restall , November 22, 2006 09:26 AM

Hi, Greg. I taught myself prolog from a textbook that was designed for an interdisciplinary logic / logic programming course. I think it was “Logic and Prolog” by Richard Spencer-Smith. This was years ago so I may be misremembering or mixing it up with another book.

Besides the basics of prolog, it introduces natural deduction and then presents prolog resolution as a natural deduction rule. Might give you some ideas at least.

josh parsons , November 24, 2006 08:24 PM

Hi Greg,

I was going to say something about the Introduction to Logic course at the University of Auckland when I saw a comment about it. So let me clarify the situation at Auckland to start with. As I understand it, the University of Auckland does not require all students to take a course in the Arts Faculty, though they can if they want to. What the University requires is that all undergraduate students take 3 (or 2?) of the so-called General Education courses. There are 4 such courses and Critical Thinking is one of them, but Introduction to Logic is not. Despite this, we had 731 students (though we had 723 in the end) in the second semester 2006. Introduction to Logic is offered 3 times a year (first and second semesters and summer school) and it now has more than 1400 students a year. (I am thinking of contacting the Guinness book actually.) As you know, the textbook or rather the workbook for the course is Rod’s text which is published only in New Zealand at this moment. The approach taken in that book is not interdisciplinary nor do we teach the course interdisciplinarily (Is that a word?). Nonetheless, many of the students are from faculties other than Arts. Some students go on to do the Logic and Computation Programme offered jointly by Philosophy, Mathematics, Computer Science and Linguistics. While the course is not interdisciplinary, it is certainly serving an interdisciplinary role. (How does this actually work? Well, that would take a long time to explain.)

The course you are after might be something like what Macquarie offers. After you left (or did you help them setting up while you were there?), they set up a course called Language, Logic and Computation. It is offered jointly by Philosophy, Computer Science and Linguistics, I believe. (I am not sure which section of the University Linguistics is supposed to be though.) The course content seems to change depending on who are actually teaching it. But it is devided into three part; philosophy, computer science and linguistics. Alex Miller used to teach the philosophy part of the course. As I understand it, it is not as unified a course as you would like yours to be. But I just thought that you might like to look into that.

Koji Tanaka , December 14, 2006 03:46 PM

The interdisciplinary basic logic course sounds incredibly interesting — this is how I always wished my introductory logic course was taught. (I’m from the SymSys program Shawn mentioned; there was always a tension between the philosophy department’s and the computer science department’s intro to logic offerings. The slight differences between the curriculums were fascinating.)

I’d be curious to hear if it takes off, or at least a proposed syllabus for it.

Brendan O'Connor , March 12, 2007 05:17 PM