If you’re interested in coming along, let the organisers know by July 1. If you’re interested in the state of the art on logical pluralism, this conference is the place to be.

Thanks, Daniel, Marcus and Peter for organising this. It’s going to be my highlight of the second half of the year.

This is a worthy goal: the more open access journals, the better! So, if you’re at all interested in argumentation theory and informal logic, please sign up.

I hope to find out more when we hear what the Dean and the Vice Chancellor has to say at a meeting of all Arts Faculty staff this Tuesday. Let’s hope that they can articulate something that goes beyond slashing positions to rectify a budget hole.

I’m sorry to start posting on something so grim, but “trouble at mill” has been on our minds since mid-2007. I hope to post more about more enjoyable things soon.

Meanwhile, take a look at my writing page. There are quite a few new items there.

As PJK said, when you change the government, you change the country…

The deadline for applying for a grant to come to the workshop is coming up very soon: it’s August 15. For more details of how to be involved, read on…

In the talk, I made heavy use of digital projection. I think you can follow the talk without it, but if you want to see the pretty pictures and diagrams, you can download the slides of the talk here:

• Logic in Australia.mov 22.5MB Quicktime file. (Navigate it by clicking or by using the arrow keys.)
• Logic in Australia.pdf 3.3MB PDF file. (This does not have all of the fancy transitions in the quicktime file.)
• Logic in Australia.key.zip 3.8MB compressed keynote file. (This has all the fancy transitions, and is the original document, but it requires Apple’s Keynote presentation program to view.)

Here are some highlights of the trip.

• Logica 2007 with so many great people, and then exploring Prague, catching up with Richard, and getting to know more Czech logicians.
• Overdosing on Medieval logic in Bonn, and especially talking over Bradwardine with Stephen Read.
• Exploring København with Christine and Zachary. It was my second visit there, and Christine’s umpteenth, so it was a lot easier to get around given than we were more familiar with the place.
• Navigating our way on the trains and buses from Århus to Legoland in Billund with Zachary, and then enjoying all there was to see and do there.
• Meeting everyone at Logic Colloquium in Wrocław — and especially thinking through — with Pavel Pudlák, Albert Visser, Alasdair Urquhart and Vedran Čačić — a counterexample to a conjecture of Grzegorczyk’s. The result of our thinking is here. Most of the thinking got done in a hike in the hills near Wrocław.
• Flying back home with Z. Normally he finds the in-flight entertainment much more attractive than mundane activities such as sleep. This can sometimes cause difficulty, especially when flying in to an airport for a quick change of planes, and we have a tired unhappy boy to navigate through the system. This time, however, he slept well on both flights (Frankfurt to Singapore and Singapore to Melbourne), and we managed to get back home with very little jetlag.

So, a good time was had by all. It’s good to be back, even if we have to struggle through a bit more of winter here. At least our AFL team is performing better than expected, so we might be able to cope with the end of the season here in football-mad Melbourne.

Please, let me know if you’re going to be around anywhere in the vicinity during this European trip. I’ll be catching up with some mates, but it’s always fun to meet more friends.

(If I owe you an email, that’s because I’ve been ridiculously busy preparing for this trip, teaching courses, looking after the boy, etc… But I’m ploughing through my backlog, and I might just get there in the next few weeks. One can hope!)

Christine took that photo on a finial-photographing expedition with Zachary and a friend from his class in school, on Zachary’s birthday a few weeks ago.

Congratulations, Christine and Adrian!

It seems to be the season for book launches. Simon Holt’s God Next Door is launching on April 19 and Matt Carter’s Minds and Computers is launching on April 23.

(Activity here on the site will be quiet as I attempt to plough through a big teaching load and rather too many work commitments…)

So, after the jump, comments on the talks:

Modal Models for Bradwardine’s Truth [1.3MB pdf]

It’s a talk giving a modal logic interpretation for a medieval theory of truth due to Thomas Bradwardine, as it’s reconstructed by Stephen Read. This will hopefully help out Steve’s project, by providing tools for exploring the strength of this kind of theory of truth.

I’ll write up an extended paper version of this after getting comments from the audience. Since the audience contains people who know a heck of a lot more than me about truth and about modal logic, I’m a little more on the anxious side than usual for such things. Wish me luck!