Hello! I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and I like thinking about – and helping other people think about – logic and philosophy and the many different ways they can inform each other. I am known for work on substructural logics, logical pluralism, and, more recently, connections between proof theory and philosophy. I use this site to post news items and the occasional thought, and to serve as a repository of my writing, presentations and teaching.


News

Books Read: August 2024

11 September 2024

Here’s August’s book haul: This month I enjoyed three novels. The most experimental of which was Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd Century, which has the form of a series of witness statements from the crew of a ship, now far away from earth. The workers, both human and artificial, have been tending a number of exotic objects from the planet New Discovery, and they find their lives changed in subtle and not-so subtle ways. The novel touches on workplace oppression, freedom, and longing for what is absent.

The other two novels were Lords of Uncreation, the final entry in a series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and The Mercy of Gods, the first entry in a new saga by James S. A. Corey Both Tchaikovsky and Corey are adept at weaving together a compelling tale at interplanetary scale. I particularly enjoyed The Mercy of Gods, which starts off with the petty academic politics of research teams competing for funding, before all hell literally breaks loose with an invasion from an implacable colonising force. We get to see our research collective deal with the PTSD resulting from witnessing the destruction of their entire way of life and being swept away to another world to do the coloniser’s bidding.

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Books Read: July 2024

22 August 2024

July and August have been really busy, not with teaching (it’s the summer teaching break), but with research and research supervision, a little bit of holiday travel, and various life things taking up my time and attention. I have had time to read, but not so much time to write paragraphs about each book. Instead of skipping the books-of-the-month post entirely, here’s a stripped back version with a link and a sentence for each book.

July was Kierkegaard month. I enjoyed reading through : Fear and Trembling, which I’d known of for many years, but never read through. He’s a striking prose stylist, as well as a thoughtful reader of the biblical Abraham and Isaac story. Alongside, I read Jeffrey Hanson’s Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith, which is not only a commentary and analysis of Fear and Trembling, but an extensive treatment of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, and a thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of Kierkegaard’s account of the life of faith.

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Books Read: June 2024

10 July 2024

June was also an enjoyable month for reading. This month’s reading was dominated by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s 864 page doorstopper Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. Having been educated in Australia, the view of history I was taught was oriented around the colonisation of the continent by the British and its aftermath. As far as the religious and social history of Europe was concerned, and the division of the Western Church that predated that colonisation, I knew some of the details, but I had no idea of how the centuries-long convulsion in church and state that was the reformation (and the counter-reformation) spread across Europe, over the 16th and 17th Centuries. MacCulloch’s painstakingly researched and very readable history helped me understand how the historical contingencies and the different twists and turns of these times have led to the distinctively modern world that took shape in the reformation’s wake.

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Books Read: May 2024

25 June 2024

May was a great reading month, but I forgot to upload my notes until June was nearly done. This month I read nine books, but one was an unpublished draft of a novel that a friend is writing, so I won’t say more about that, until there is more news to share. The other fiction reads this month could not be more different from each other. Beyond the Light Horizon concludes Ken MacLeod’s most recent politically charged Scotland-based near-future science fiction trilogy. The ending was a bit rushed for my taste, but it was an enjoyable ride along the way.

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy could not be more different. A gargantuan (736 page) novel, it reads like a stream of consciousness. It is set in the north of Australia, with a cast of indigenous characters making their way in a surreal world falling apart around them. I was enchanted by the rhythm and the texture and the distinctive voice of the words, sentences and paragraphs, while I struggled to hold the whole thing in view. It’s not an easy read, but it is up there with the most memorable novels I’ve read in the last few years.

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Earlier this month I got a lovely package in the mail. A Chinese translation of my intro logic text. My colleague and friend Min Xu completed his translation of my text, and it’s now available.

A page spread of the beginning of Chapter 5 of a Chinese translation of a logic text
The beginning of Chapter 5.

Another month, and another pile of books I’ve managed to read. This month’s reading started on the Isle of Iona, where we had a short Easter break. On the last day on the island, and then on the ferry journeys back to the “mainland”, I finished The Life of St Columba, who served as the Abbot of Iona and, as legend has it, brought Christianity to Scotland, from Ireland, dying in 597.

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I’ve just emerged from two intense days of proof theory. Three of my graduate students, Sophie Nagler, Viviane Fairbank and Francisca Silva, organised a two-day workshop on proof theory and its connections to philosophy and other fields.

A group of 22 people, standing in front of a closed white arched door in a large stone building
Some of the workshop participants at the end of a busy day of proof theory.

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Recent Writing

Generics: Inference & Accommodation (to appear in Mind, Language, and Social Hierarchy: Constructing a Shared Social World, Sally Haslanger, Karen Jones, François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter, editors, Oxford University Press) Abstract PDF
“Questions, Justification Requests, Inference, and Definition” Synthese 204:139 (2024) Abstract PDF
Substructural Logics,” an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024. (Substantial revision of the 2000 entry.) Abstract
Introduction to Classical Logic Greg Restall, translated by Xu Min. Huazhong University of Science & Technology Press, 2024. Abstract
Reflections on Brady's Logic of Meaning Containment (to appear in The Australasian Journal of Logic) Abstract PDF
Proofs with Star and Perp (to appear in New Directions in Relevant Logics) Abstract PDF
Greg Restall and Shawn Standefer, “Collection Frames for Distributive Substructural Logics,” Review of Symbolic Logic, (2023) 16:4, 1120-1157. Abstract PDF

Recent Presentations

Defining Quantifiers, Topics in Free Logic, a workshop at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy; 16 November 2024. COMING SOON
What Can We Mean? — on practices, norms and pluralism, The Aristotelian Society; 28 October 2024.
What do calculators tell us about meaning?, St Andrews PhilSoc; 7 October 2024.
Models for Identity in Three-Valued Logics, British Logic Colloquium 2024; 5 September 2024.
What Do We Mean? Semantics, Practices and Pluralism, Arché Metaphysics and Logic Seminar; 3 July 2024.
What ‘No’ Does, Arché Day 2024; 28 June 2024.
Natural Deduction Proof for Substructural, Constructive and Classical Logics, Leeds Logic Seminar; 1 May 2024.

Recent Classes

PY2010: Intermediate Logic, the University of St Andrews; September 2024. NOW ON
Proof Theory, Nordic Logic Summer School 2024; June 2024.
PY4612: Advanced Logic, the University of St Andrews; January 2024.
PY2010: Intermediate Logic, the University of St Andrews; September 2023.
PY4601: Paradoxes, the University of St Andrews; January 2023.
PY1012: Reasoning, the University of St Andrews; January 2023.
PY3100: Reading Philosophy 1—Texts in Language, Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Metaphysics and Science, the University of St Andrews; September 2022.

about

I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. I am the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology I like thinking about – and helping other people think about – logic and philosophy and the many different ways they can inform each other.

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