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.
- “Molinism and the Thin Red Line,” paper in progress. Presented at the Molinism: The Contemporary Debate conference hosted by Ken Perszyk and Ed Mares at Victoria University of Wellington. →
- “Modal Models for Bradwardine’s Theory of Truth,” Review of Symbolic Logic 1 (2008), 225-240. Special issue on Mathematical Methods in Philosophy, edited by Richard Zach, Alasdair Urquhart and Aldo Antonelli →
- “Assertion and Denial, Commitment and Entitlement, and Incompatibility (and some consequence),” Studies in Logic 1 (2008), 26-36. →
- [with Tony Roy] “On Permutation in Simplified Semantics,” to appear in the Journal of Philosophical Logic. →
- “Proof Theory and Meaning: on second order logic,” pp 157-170 in Logica 2007 Yearbook, edited by Michal Pelis, Filosofia, 2008. →
Recent Comments
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Links
- Restricted Arrow: a paper on new proof systems for some substructural logics: The first (of many) publications by my former PhD student, the soon-to-be-Dr Conrad Asmus. Well done!
- Recent Philosophy Stories at Radio National: ABC Radio National's Philosophy subject page. You can podcast all philosophy-related ABC RN stories there.
- TR-2008012: Product-free Lambek Calculus is NP-complete: Yury Savateev shows that the derivability problems for product-free Lambek calculus and product-free Lambek calculus allowing empty premises are NP-complete. Looks neat.
- Melbourne Uni academics face axe | theage.com.au: This -- alas -- does seem to be a pretty straight account of the situation in the Arts Faculty here at Melbourne. There's a fair bit more pain to be endured before the budget is balanced.
- Dimensions movies for my iPod: Nicely done mathematical exposition of projections, geometry, and interesting things like that. Good fun to watch on the tram to work.
These and more links are available at del.icio.us/greg_restall.
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.
Pain, stress, redundancies, another day at the office
I had thought that we (the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne) were trying to keep our difficulties an internal affair, but apparently we’re not. Given that this is all public news, I suppose I could comment.
The take-home-message from this memo from the Dean: (1) The budget in the Arts Faculty is not yet in the black, though it’s getting better, and (2) The plan is for more voluntary ‘redundancies’ (this is now Round 3), this time with the shadow of involuntary redundancies is we don’t get enough voluntary ones to right the ship.
The discipline of Philosophy took an almighty hit at the end of Round 1. At the end of 2007 we had 5 departures out of a full-time teaching staff of 10.5. So we’ve done rather more than our part of the deal in righting the budgetary situation — except for the very real problem of ‘overcorrecting,’ making it rather more difficult to teach a coherent Philosophy major in the BA (with keen, bright students ready to learn), supervise our wonderful graduate students, and get research done. There are so few philosophers left, this round of redundancies is not directed at us, but we feel for our colleagues down the corridors, and across the campus.
The future for us is murky, but at least there’s very real prospect for rebuilding once the rest of the Faculty has sorted out its bottom line. In the near term we’re going to have to be very creative to get enough bodies on the ground to do our jobs well. We’re looking at other sources of funding, grants, bringing people on research fellowships, etc. That’s all good, but of course, what we most need is a stable core group of people to teach and research and run the place. In this environment, with the best will in the world from colleagues, it’s still touch and go as to how we get through it. The next few months are crucial.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been rather out-of-communication on the website for the last months. Both figuring out how to we philosophers at Melbourne work through this, and managing the stress it’s been causing has been a struggle. (Ask my long-suffering spouse and child—they’ll tell you.)
Posted 10:35 AM on August 20, 2008
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