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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.

“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. →

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.

Amsterdam!

I’ve arrived in Amsterdam. Getting here was touch-and-go. My decent wait between my Melbourne → Singapore flight and my Singapore → Amsterdam leg whittled down to around 45 minutes. That involved a trek through the terminal, a tense wait at Transfer Desk C (where people in the queue in front of me were arguing with the staff about visas, and people behind me were concerned that they wouldn’t get on the flight — and were expressing this concern, rather vocally). I got there in the end, but it was a rush.

Highlight of the trip? Reading 100 pages of Anil Gupta’s Empricism and Experience. This is very good. It’s (1) logically sharp, (2) applied to philosophical issues of deep concern and most interestingly (3) original and creative, and enlightening. He cuts at deep issues with classical empiricism, at a level of abstraction that — I’m convinced — gets to the heart of the matter in a new and illuminating way. Characterising classical empiricism as the result of a number of theses concerning what is given in experience (that it’s propositional, veridical, and multiply factorisable), and that this combination — rather than the argument from Illusion and the debate surrounding this — that dooms classical empiricism to never explain the epistemic success we have. It’s rigourous, illuminating and spot on. (Oh, and the comments on Quine — to the effect that accepts exactly the wrong parts of classical empiricism, to betray naturalism for a kind of idealism — alone are worth the price of admission.)

I’ve decided now that when I grow up I want to be able to think and write like Anil.

Lowlight of the trip? Having my order for an Asian Vegetarian meal ignored by KLM at one meal. When I mentioned to the steward that this salad didn’t look very vegetarian (with the chicken and all), — and that I had ordered a vegetarian meal when I booked my flight — she apologised, and got me a replacement salad. It looked like a very odd potato salad. I couldn’t place where I’d seen potato sliced so thinly in a potato salad, but there was so much mayonnaise that I couldn’t really tell. What I couldn’t really tell, of course, was that it was a salad whose principle ingredient (well, competing with the mayonnaise) was ham. That’s a salad that vegetarians, Muslims and Jews can all get behind! Oh well.

The rest of the flight was fine. I use flights to sleep, read, and while having meals, catch up on my trashy movie viewing. This time, Iron Man and The Bank Job. Both were enjoyable in a throwaway sort of way.

And today I’ve waited at Schiphol for longer than I’d hoped to, waiting for my bag to catch up, strolled around the city, and pored over Dutch Masters at the Rijksmuseum. I’ve got some more exploration to do this evening, and then tomorrow too.

Posted 11:37 PM on August 24, 2008