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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.

“Proof Theory and Meaning: on second order logic,” pp 157-170 in Logica 2007 Yearbook, edited by Michal Pelis, Filosofia, 2008. →
“Assertion and Denial, Commitment and Entitlement, and Incompatibility (and some consequence),” to appear in Logical Studies, a new journal published by the Institute for Logic and Cognition at Sun Yat-Sen University →
“Logic in Australasia,” to appear in a volume on the History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, edited by Nick Trakakis and others, Lexington Books. →
“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. →

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.

In Banff: Delia Graff Fara

The next Banff talk is Delia Graff Fara, on “Relative identity and de re modality.” She’s defending the thesis that material objects are identical to the matter of which they’re constituted. For example, the statue Goliath (G) is identical to the lump of clay Lumpel (L). She wants to allow that L = G, while having L and G differing in their temporal and modal properties. So, for example, in the future, a some more clay might become a part of the statue G, while not becoming a part of the lump of clay L. The original lump of clay is still present (and is joined by more clay), the original statue is still present, and is now larger. You can see why this is desirable: after the addition of more clay, there’s still only one statue there, and the old statue did not disappear only to be replaced by a new one.

Delia wants to preserve the truth of claims that statues don’t have all their parts essentially, while portions of matter do have their parts essentially, while holding that statues are identical to portions of matter. How can we do this? I find this kind of work interesting, but deeply difficult. Delia’s talk had a fair bit of relatively informal philosophy in it — it was a discussion of counterpart relations and such critters — and other participants followed the dialectic more closely than I did. I always get confused by this kind of problem. There are other talks at the workshop on quantified modal logic, which will hopefully give me some helpful ideas.

Posted 05:37 AM on February 20, 2007