Logic List Mailing Archive

CAMELEON (Cambridge, Leeds or Norwich), Logic Meeting, Cambridge (U.K.), End of March 2009

CAMELEON (CAMbridgE LEeds Or Norwich) exists to further links between 
logicians at the three universities its name alludes to. It has funding 
from  The London Mathematical Society  and The Margaret and Wes Phoa 
Foundation.

A selection of minicourses.  Tell your students.  It should be fun. Funds
 
available for board and lodging for students.  Please tell your students 
to tell me pretty soon if they want to come.

http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/Seminars/CAMELEON/
End of March 2009

The meeting will run from friday evening until sunday afternoon in Meeting
 
Room 4 in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences. Financial help is 
available for students.

The weekend will be devoted to a set of minicourses: The idea is that the
 
minicourses will run concurrently, each with three or four lectures spread
 
over three days.

John Truss: Countably categorical structures, Fraisse etc
Peter Smith: Gdel's incompleteness theorems
Thomas Forster: Countable ordinals, fast growing functions etc.
Wilfrid Hodges: History of Logic

History of logic

A global problem in the history of logic is why progress between Aristotle
 
and the nineteenth century was so painfully slow. Among various likely 
reasons, one is that several ideas we take for granted today were in 
conflict with basic and often unspoken principles of traditional logic. I
 
trace this for three ideas.

Lecture One: Relational logic, which was in conflict with the principle of
 
Top-Level Processing. Evidence: Ibn Sina 'Qiyas', Ockham, Leibniz, Frege 
'Begriffsschrift'.

Lecture Two: Discharge of assumptions, which was in conflict with the 
principle of Local Formalising. Evidence: Ibn Sina 'Qiyas', Port-Royal 
Logic, Frege 'Grundlagen der Geometrie', Lukasiewicz.

Lecture Three: Type-theoretic semantics, which was in conflict with the 
Aristotle-Porphyry theory of ideas. Evidence: Ammonius, Ibn Sina 'Ibara',
 
Wallis, Frege 'Grundlagen der Arithmetik' and 'Grundgesetze'.
(I hope to be able to hand out translations of the relevant essays of Ibn
 
Sina).