Peter Smith's Blog

Footnote to the week: Songs of passion.

Not a logical week, but a great couple of days in London. The high point, a quite outstanding evening at Wigmore Hall — the wondrous Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford (and the Jupiter ensemble) performing Dowland and Purcell.

Their new CD is terrific, and the live version of basically the same programme was even more so. One of the very best concerts we have been to in recent years, with Lea Desandre absolutely compelling. The barely controlled emotion as she sung Purcell’s “O let me weep, for ever weep” — interweaving with Louise Ayrton’s touchingly plangent baroque violin — made for an extraordinary experience. And as for Dido’s Lament …

Not that the concert was all sombre or doleful. For example, “O let me weep …” was followed immediately with sunlight in “Now the night is chased away.” Here’s a snatch from their rehearsal of that earlier in the day. And as you’ll see, while Jupiter are joined by four singers on the CD, in the concert — quite delightfully — the band themselves also provided, as it were, Lea’s occasional backing vocals. An evening to remember for a long time.

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Footnotes to the week: Greek readings

What have I been reading this week? I finished The Voyage Home, the most recent in Pat Barker’s wonderful series re-imaging episodes from the Trojan War. This time, it’s Agamemnon’s voyage home after the war, and his death at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, which is re-told (mostly as seen through the eyes of a captive maid to Cassandra, the Trojan princess taken by Agamemnon as a trophy concubine). But you very probably know that, and won’t at all need me to tell you just how good Pat Barker’s trilogy is. So let me say something instead about a different book, which you might not know about.

I am a great admirer of A.E. Stallings poetry — the way her enticing surface formal play with rhyme and metre is married to depth and insight, the way she often gives new life to ancient voices (Persephone, Daphne, Penelope, …) yet her poems “come out of life’s dailiness”. Her This Afterlife: Selected Poems (2022) is full of subtle inventiveness, and — as a reviewer put it — she “demonstrates that in the right poet’s hands, the putative everydayness of the hic et nunc can be transformed into something every bit as rich and strange as even the most ancient myths.”  

But you probably know that too! However I only recently noted that Stallings’ had a new book out in April. Her Frieze Frame is on the rich and strange history of the Parthenon Marbles, and how “poets, painters, and their friends framed the debates around Elgin” and his acquisition (or should that be ‘looting’?) of the Marbles. I have just finished this too, and warmly recommend it.

The book began as a short lockdown essay, and has grown to become a quite fascinating scrapbook full of picaresque detail — ridiculous, infuriating, distressing, touching in turn. And as you’d expect, the writing can be wonderful. How about this, on the actress Melina Mercouri who became Greek Minster of Culture, and a passionate advocate for the return of the Marbles: “The Greeks loved her for this campaign and activism, quite apart from her acting; the Acropolis Metro Station is decorated with a famous photograph of her holding a summer bouquet, standing below the Parthenon on the Acropolis, so that she seems of a piece with one of the sturdy corner columns. In her fawn-colored trench coat, the same pale tawny color as the Pentelic marbles, with her weathered statuesque beauty, she could be a Caryatid on holiday, letting the wind run through her faded blonde hair and clutching the fresh flowers of the eternally recurring Greek spring.” Even if you know the basic story, this is just a terrific read.

I mused here a few weeks ago that it would be really good if there were a student-orientated(?) book which “played through some of the greatest hits from logic’s back catalogue” with zip and zest, engendering rather more excitement than e.g. the dutiful efforts in The History of Philosophical and Formal Logic (Bloomsbury 2017). Which got me wondering what an enticing chapter on Aristotle’s logic might look like. So the man himself has provided my other Greek reading this week. Along with a stash of hugely illuminating related articles, in particular by the estimable Jonathan Barnes.

Which has been pretty enjoyable — though it has certainly distracted me from what I was planning to be doing (getting back to updating the Study Guide) while also leaving me even more unsure how you’d do justice to Aristotle in a reasonably short piece.

It did strike me, though, that something that might be fun to do is to it take the often telegraphic lecture-notes that comprise the dozen pages of APr 1,2, 4–7 and — as it were — write out the lectures in a modern-reader-friendly way (or at least lectures as might have been given by a counterpart of Aristotle in some not too remote possible world). A devoted ancient philosophy student, with the translations and lengthy commentaries of Robin Smith and of Gisela Striker to hand (and ideally the original text too), can work things out. However that’s a big ask for someone whose first interest is in logic but who would be intrigued to get a real sense of how things started though without putting in too much time and energy.

A cheering small (very small) moment at the end of week. A mini Amazon review of the category theory book arrives online. “A superb introduction!” OK: I can raise a glass to that.

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Footnotes to the week: Zen painting, the size of sets, Maddy

Just before we went off to Zürich, we had our house painted outside (the doors, the windows, and so forth). It took fourteen days, not because we have a mansion but because a lot of preparatory work was needed, cutting out minor rot, repairing, filling, etc., and our decorator then did the most meticulous painting job. It looks terrific. But of course, the consequence is that lots of the inside paintwork now suddenly doesn’t seem quite so great. So I’ve been inspired to make a start on the long list of redecorating tasks that I’d been putting off.

Which is really quite enjoyable in its way, though horrendously time-consuming to do properly. And it requires concentration too. Whole mornings just disappear in a Zen-like state of careful brushwork. As a result, much less reading and writing of an even vaguely logical kind is getting done at the moment. Though I’m now a bit of an expert on Farrow & Ball’s thirty-seven whiter shades of pale …

One paper I did read this week with admiration is the logic-related piece among the ten papers selected for the latest volume of The Philosopher’s Annual. This is Nicholas DiBella’s “Cantor, Choice, and Paradox,” originally published in the Philosophical Review. Here’s the author’s abstract:

I propose a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the Axiom of Choice is false. I argue that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the Axiom of Choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory.

That’s some conspectus! But the result is indeed impressive. Extremely lucidly written, engagingly novel, indeed suprisingly interesting and fruitful, but also judicious (not over-selling its claims). A model, I’d say, of how to write well at this level about logical matters.

Springer published last year — in the ongoing series ‘Outstanding Contributions to Logic’ — a volume of essays on Penelope Maddy’s work, edited by Sophia Arbeiter and Juliette Kennedy. I’ve been dipping in: but I have to report that I have been finding this mostly disappointing — which is no faulty of Maddy’s: she writes illuminating replies to (nearly all) the essays, which are probably the best thing about the book. But too many of the papers she is replying to strike me as, shall we say, unexciting. And not models of writing to be emulated.

I come to this volume with mixed views about Maddy’s work. For example, I was very engaged by her short book Defending the Axioms: On the Philosophical Foundations of Set Theory (2011); Luca Incurvati and I wrote an unpersuaded but not unfriendly review for Mind. On the other hand, I thought her later book The Logical Must: Wittgenstein on Logic (2014) quite misguided. Maddy says in her Introduction that her primary aim is “simply historical — to understand Wittgenstein better”. But a number of reviewers noted just how far Maddy seems to be from understanding the thrust of Wittgenstein’s thinking about logic (see, for example,  Martin Gustafsson’s review here).

Of course, it could be that the naturalistic view of logic Maddy adumbrates there is defensible even if she has gone badly wrong in thinking of it is as where Wiggenstein, properly understood, leads us. But I’m not persuaded. And I’m not helped to come to terms with her view by any of the papers contributed to this collection: the one that most engages with Maddy on Wittgenstein on logic is a 26 page ramble by Curtis Franks, “Wittgenstein’s Wayward Student: The Unauthorized Autobiography”. Not my cup of tea, to put it mildly.

No, the primary foci of the contributions (as you’d in fact expect) are firstly set theory (and in particular, ways of extending ZFC), and then Maddy’s contrasts between varieties of realisms and arealism about sets. Interesting/important topics, but I’ve decided against putting in the work to try to write up careful responses to the relevant pieces. Partly that’s because of the pressure of other things I want to be doing. And partly it’s because, when they get down to the nitty gritty, a number of the more technical contributions related to set theory are (to be honest) beyond my pay grade. For example, I’m not in a great position to engage usefully with e.g. John Steel writing on the generic multiverse (and he doesn’t make things easy for his reader — the paper he is replying to by Maddy and Toby Meadows is considerably more accessible and helpful).

The dust has yet to settle on recent debates about varieties of multiversism. For more debates, there are three “Conversations” involving set theorists reproduced at the end of the book. Then Maddy herself offers as the final essay in the collection an interesting new piece which aims to “isolate a surprising range of multiverse positions, revealing their sometimes-dubious metaphysical underpinnings and demonstrating that the distinction between multiversism and universism is often muddier than it might appear”. This is helpful.

One much older, less exotic, issue in the philosophy of set theory is how to construe talk of proper classes as contrasted with sets — which is arguably tied up with the question of how to regard logical classes (property-extensions) as contrasted with sets as explicated in the iterative conception. Maddy discussed the general problem long since in her 1983 JSL paper ‘Proper Classes’, where she reaches the interim conclusion that “In our search for a realistic theory of sets and classes, we [should] begin with two desiderata:
(1) classes should be real, well-defined entities;
(2) classes should be significantly different from sets.
The central problem is that it is hard to satisfy both of these.” She then proposed a theory to meet these desiderata, inspired by the structure of Kripke’s theory of truth.

Considerably later, Øystein Linnebo has a particularly insightful discussion in his ‘Pluralities and sets’ (J. Phil. 2010), again aiming for an account satisfying (1) and (2). So it intriguing to find him returning to the theme in the present collection in his contribution ‘Maddy on classes’. Here he argues that while Maddy’s original approach had promising features, her own development of the core idea was problematic. However, potential repairs run into more trouble, and Linnebo’s ultimate verdict is that “the picture that emerges is thus one of a failed research program”. But negative results are good to have! — and he concludes by suggesting another approach which (he argues) looks as if it should work better. I need to reflect some more: but this is a contribution worth reading and thinking about.

What about the discussions of Maddy on (anti)-realisms in this volume (see the review by Luca and myself for brief headlines about the issues)? I’ll mention the two best pieces. In rough terms, John Burgess complains (not entirely clearly) that Maddy strays too far in the direction of a nominalism and fictionalism about mathematics; going in the opposite direction Mary Leng (writing with her characteristic transparency) wants to push Maddy to take a step or two further towards her own brand of fictionalism. The replies perhaps help to better locate Maddy’s position — but puzzles remain.

Finally, although it is tedious to mention this, like others of the ‘Outstanding Contributions to Logic’ volumes, this one is oustandingly — not to say outlandishly, outrageously — expensive. Perhaps your university library has an e-copy available. Otherwise …

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Footnotes to the week: Mellor, Sets, Mozart

Hugh Mellor in 2008

It is difficult to believe that Hugh Mellor died over five years ago: he was a very generous and loyal friend, and still much missed. And I have been thinking about him particularly this week, prompted by Tim Crane’s newly published biographical memoir for the British Academy. I think Tim does a really fine job, both on the man and his philosophy. Read his piece!

I am quite out of the loop now, on current discussions about causation, chance, time, dispositions, facts, and others of Hugh’s metaphysical preoccupations. My sense, though, is that his work is less read, less engaged with, than it surely deserves. For example, I see that the Stanford Encyclopaedia article on the metaphysics of causation in effect mentions him just once in passing. Why this lack of impact of Hugh’s major The Facts of Causation (1995) which says a lot on just this topic? Perhaps it is not irrelevant that that book is surprisingly hard going, as reviewers at the time noted. Oddly so, when his earlier books and indeed contemporaneous papers (and Hugh in conversation) were so lucid and accessible. The book’s arguments too could be unsatisfyingly brisk, as e.g. Dorothy Edgington found in her fine BJPS review article. But, echoing Tim, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an original metaphysical story here about how causation, chance and the rest hang together, and one whose realist, anti-reductionist, themes have considerable attractions and deserve further exploration.

I’ve been rather distracted, then, from what I planned to be doing this week by dipping again into some of Hugh’s writing that you can find linked at hughmellor.com. And I was amused to come across this, in an interview published in Theoria in 2001. Noting that people postulate entities, such as properties, for various semantic purposes, Hugh continues:

It seems to me that before doing that, they should check what reasons there are for thinking there are such entities, as indeed they often do. That is why, for example, many logicians would prefer a logic or a semantics that did without sets, in which, to be honest, I doubt if anyone really believes. Talk about a set of things looks, to the outsider, like a way of using a singular term

Amusing, because the logic-related book I’ve been looking at this week is The Philosophy of Penelope Maddy, a substantial collection of papers published last year, mostly with replies by Maddy. The first group of six pieces is by a number of enthusiasts for sets, who most certainly believe in sets (Maddy herself countenances a more nuanced Arealism).

Now, it might be said that the sort of set that Hugh is sceptical about — e.g. a supposed set of heroes {Ramsey, Braithwaite, Reichenbach}, which arguably is really nothing over and above the men, plural — is not the kind of mathematical purely abstract object of the set-theorist’s dreams: so there is no lurking clash here. But the trouble is that set-theorists are wont to initially motivate their talk of sets with humdrum examples of sets of people, playing cards, and the like. And if such humdrum talk is indeed not really referring to special entities but is ripe for elimination in favour of frankly plural talk about people, cards and other whatnots, where exactly does that leave our supposed route into understanding what abstract set theory is about?

I’ll leave that question hanging as a tease! — but I want to return to say something more serious about the Maddy collection next week.

What have I been listening to? A year or two back, I really enjoyed a couple of earlier CDs of Scarlatti sonatas by the young Italian pianist Francesco Colli, so I was intrigued to see he has started releasing some Mozart discs, with the second out this month. But sadly, I think he tries more than a bit too hard to be inventive and imaginative. His approach works, perhaps, with the K331 Sonata where Colli manages in particular to make the hackneyed, oh-so-familiar, Alla Turca final movement sound fresh and full of wit. But he surely overdoes it with e.g. the delightful 12 Variations on ‘Ah, vous dirai-je maman’ (‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, to you). Elisabeth Brauß, for one, plays the piece with the gentler charm and affection it calls for, so listen to her instead.

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Footnotes to the week: Russians, Venetians, Van Gogh

It is time to face the book problem again. We had to clear a whole floor-to-ceiling bay of bookshelves so our plumber could drop new pipework down at the back of the bay (long boring story). And we forced ourselves to be selective about what to reshelve after the work was finished and the re-decoration was done. At least the living room floor isn’t now cluttered with books as it was before the cull. Instead there are piles in the hall, waiting to be collected by a charity bookshop.

But one of those piles isn’t quite so high today. I blame James Marriott’s always interesting Substack, Cultural Capital. In yesterday’s post, he extols Orlando Figes’s history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy. I confess I had put this massive book on the pile destined for the Amnesty shop (thinking, realistically if regretfully, that if I hadn’t read it yet, I probably wasn’t going to get round to it in my remaining allotment of days, much as though I had loved the same author’s Natasha’s Dance). But prompted by Marriott, I rescued the book, just temporarily I thought, and then found that half the afternoon had gone as I started reading. So it is back on a different pile, the must-read-soon. I had better rescue Figes’s The Whisperers too … Ah well.

I’ve another Russian book to finish first, though. Recently, I have for the sixth or seventh time been reading Anna Karenina, this time in the wonderful translation by Rosamund Bartlett — which I’d hugely recommend over e.g. Pevear/Volokhonsky, though I still warm to the old Penguin translation by Rosemary Edmonds (here’s a brief piece by Bartlett on the difficulties of translating Tolstoy).

It’s a banal thing to say, though none the less strikingly true — the Anna Karenina you read at twenty is not the book you encounter again at thirty, or forty, or again later. This time, I have in fact had to stop for the last few weeks, as I was finding it almost unbearably sad, much more so than I remembered. Too much so for bedtime reading. But stunning of course: I’ll return to it soon.

So what have I been reading instead this week? I finished Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, much admired by some critics, but which I found a disappointing sequel to Brooklyn. (Yes, Jim Farrell in particular is mixed up and confused — such is life — but to the point that he seems to have become a rather blank non-character we cannot care about, which makes it indeed hard to understand why Eilis and Nancy should care. ) For sheer enjoyment, I recommend instead what I’m reading now, Tracy Chevalier’s wonderfully vivid, time-skipping, The Glassmaker. OK, occasionally the prose is a bit flat-footed; but this is written with an engaging imaginative verve (and you learn something about Venetian glass making over the centuries too).

I’ll return to logic next week. Meanwhile, the striking picture above? One of the Van Gogh paintings in the Zürich Kunsthaus, which we found ourselves returning to more than once. Astonishing.

The post Footnotes to the week: Russians, Venetians, Van Gogh appeared first on Logic Matters.

Footnotes to the week

It is time to face the book problem again. We had to clear a whole floor-to-ceiling bay of bookshelves so our plumber could drop new pipework down at the back of the bay (long boring story). And we forced ourselves to be selective about what to reshelve after the work was finished and the re-decoration was done. At least the living room floor isn’t now cluttered with books as it was before the cull. Instead there are piles in the hall, waiting to be collected by a charity bookshop.

But one of those piles isn’t quite so high today. I blame James Marriott’s always interesting Substack, Cultural Capital. In yesterday’s post, he extols Orlando Figes’s history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy. I confess I had put this massive book on the pile destined for the Amnesty shop (thinking, realistically if regretfully, that if I hadn’t read it yet, I probably wasn’t going to get round to it in my remaining allotment of days, much as though I had loved the same author’s Natasha’s Dance). But prompted by Marriott, I rescued the book, just temporarily I thought, and then found that half the afternoon had gone as I started reading. So it is back on a different pile, the must-read-soon. I had better rescue Figes’s The Whisperers too … Ah well.

I’ve another Russian book to finish first, though. Recently, I have for the sixth or seventh time been reading Anna Karenina, this time in the wonderful translation by Rosamund Bartlett — which I’d hugely recommend over e.g. Pevear/Volokhonsky, though I still warm to the old Penguin translation by Rosemary Edmonds (here’s a brief piece by Bartlett on the difficulties of translating Tolstoy).

It’s a banal thing to say, though none the less strikingly true — the Anna Karenina you read at twenty is not the book you encounter again at thirty, or forty, or again later. This time, I have in fact had to stop for the last few weeks, as I was finding it almost unbearably sad, much more so than I remembered. Too much so for bedtime reading. But stunning of course: I’ll return to it soon.

So what have I been reading instead this week? I finished Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, much admired by some critics, but which I found a disappointing sequel to Brooklyn. (Yes, Jim Farrell in particular is mixed up and confused — such is life — but to the point that he seems to have become a rather blank non-character we cannot care about, which makes it indeed hard to understand why Eilis and Nancy should care. ) For sheer enjoyment, I recommend instead what I’m reading now, Tracy Chevalier’s wonderfully vivid, time-skipping, The Glassmaker which is written with considerable imaginative verve (and you learn something about Venetian glass making over the centuries too).

I’ll return to logic next week. Meanwhile, the striking picture above? One of the Van Gogh paintings in the Zürich Kunsthaus, which we found ourselves returning to more than once. Astonishing.

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Postcard from Zürich

Five days in Zürich, mostly to have quality time with The Daughter. Hence more hours have been spent in long lunches and dinners, and strolling, and stops for mother/daughter shopping, than in ticking off the tourist top ten must-sees. Which has all been very enjoyable.

Though as often before, wandering around a European city, it is difficult not to be struck again by how shabby and run down the centre of Cambridge seems in comparison, despite this being one of the richest places in the land. Yes, some of the Victorian domestic streets away from the centre are very pleasant and exceedingly well cared for. But the market square (for example) has become a visual slum from the incompetently laid cheapest of pavings to the mostly ghastly shop-fronts. Private affluence and public squalor.

But back to Zürich! A particular highlight was the two mornings we spent at the Kunsthaus which is just wonderful (as you can see from the website). The architecture of the buildings old and new is hugely impressive and the collections are jaw-dropping. And I doubt that we saw half of what they have. Highly recommended. It would be very good to be able to go back one day.

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IFL again, Gödel exercises, Purcell

I hadn’t planned to return to Introducing Formal Logic just yet. But the last week or so I’ve found myself tinkering with the opening chapters. And, sad to relate, I’ve been enjoying the tinkering. So I might continue doing just that.

The first edition of IFL concentrated on logic by trees. Many looking for a course text complained about this. The second edition, also initially published by CUP, replaced the chapters on trees with chapters on a natural deduction proof system, done Fitch-style. Which again didn’t please everyone! Because it is no longer subject CUP’s length constraints, a third edition could now cover both trees and natural deduction. The plan would be to construct the book so you can pick and choose a preferred route through the chapters (concentrating on just trees, on just ND, tackling both, or even neither).

There are so very many introductions to logic — from excellent to awful — that it is pretty unlikely that many would ever encounter my book as an official set text. So if I do push on with a full third edition, I’ll want this time to more attentively structure IFL so that it will at least provide useful additional/parallel reading to back up a wide range of courses.

And I’d like to add a few more asides along the way on the Great Dead Logicians (for fun and illumination, not out of a sense of historical piety). Ah, but where to put the asides? Weaving them into the main text can be distracting, and make an already long section too long. Endnotes are the work of the devil, bad enough in a printed book, maybe even worse in a PDF document. I’ve just been experimenting with marginal notes: but they are a very inefficient use of space, and also visually too intrusive for what are intended as supplementary asides. So old-school footnotes it will have to be.

I took a stern line in IFL (encouraged by my good friend the late Hugh Mellor, who took the view: if it really matters, put it in the main text; if it doesn’t leave it out). But I’m mellowing with age …

I’ve just received a query: What happened to the rest of the Exercises of IGT2?

Fair question. The fact is that I was rather disheartened when I initially posted the exercises and their solutions to find that they were rarely downloaded.

But I have just checked again, to find that the answers to some sets of exercises have been downloaded a few dozen times this month. It was similar in March, with different sets being the most downloaded. There were more downloads, then, than I was expecting to see. But perhaps not quite so many as to encourage me to prioritise constructing more exercise sets over all other projects. For thinking up exercises and writing solutions can be surprisingly time-consuming.

So the short answer to the query is: more exercises for IGT2 may slowly appear, a few now and then. but don’t hold your breath! My apologies to anyone out there who has been finding the exercises useful and is eager for more!

Footnotes! Non-existent Gödel exercises!! I spoil you with exciting content. And let me spoil you some more. Here is the always stunning Lea Desdandre with Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter ensemble, a trailer for their new CD coming out in September (when, hooray, we have tickets to see them performing the same repertoire at a Wigmore Hall concert). Purcell, Dido’s lament:

The post IFL again, Gödel exercises, Purcell appeared first on Logic Matters.

Footnotes, Gödel exercises, Purcell

I hadn’t planned to return to Introducing Formal Logic just yet. But the last week or so I’ve found myself tinkering with the opening chapters. And, sad to relate, I’ve been enjoying the tinkering. So I might continue doing just that.

The first edition of IFL concentrated on logic by trees. Many looking for a course text complained about this. The second edition, also initially published by CUP, replaced the chapters on trees with chapters on a natural deduction proof system, done Fitch-style. Which again didn’t please everyone! Because it is no longer subject CUP’s length constraints, a third edition could now cover both trees and natural deduction. The plan would be to construct the book so you can pick and choose a preferred route through the chapters (concentrating on just trees, on just ND, tackling both, or even neither).

There are so very many introductions to logic — from excellent to awful — that it is pretty unlikely that many would ever encounter my book as an official set text. So if I do push on with a full third edition, I’ll want this time to more attentively structure IFL so that it will at least provide useful additional/parallel reading to back up a wide range of courses.

And I’d like to add a few more asides along the way on the Great Dead Logicians (for fun and illumination, not out of a sense of historical piety). Ah, but where to put the asides? Weaving them into the main text can be distracting, and make an already long section too long. Endnotes are the work of the devil, bad enough in a printed book, maybe even worse in a PDF document. I’ve just been experimenting with marginal notes: but they are a very inefficient use of space, and also visually too intrusive for what are intended as supplementary asides. So old-school footnotes it will have to be.

I took a stern line in IFL (encouraged by my good friend the late Hugh Mellor, who took the view: if it really matters, put it in the main text; if it doesn’t leave it out). But I’m mellowing with age …

I’ve just received a query: What happened to the rest of the Exercises of IGT2?

Fair question. The fact is that I was rather disheartened when I initially posted the exercises and their solutions to find that they were rarely downloaded.

But I have just checked again, to find that the answers to some sets of exercises have been downloaded a few dozen times this month. It was similar in March, with different sets being the most downloaded. There were more downloads, then, than I was expecting to see. But perhaps not quite so many as to encourage me to prioritise constructing more exercise sets over all other projects. For thinking up exercises and writing solutions can be surprisingly time-consuming.

So the short answer to the query is: more exercises for IGT2 may slowly appear, a few now and then. but don’t hold your breath! My apologies to anyone out there who has been finding the exercises useful and is eager for more!

Footnotes! Non-existent Gödel exercises!! I spoil you with exciting content. And let me spoil you some more. Here is the always stunning Lea Desdandre with Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter ensemble, a trailer for their new CD coming out in September (when, hooray, we have tickets to see them performing the same repertoire at a Wigmore Hall concert). Purcell, Dido’s lament:

The post Footnotes, Gödel exercises, Purcell appeared first on Logic Matters.

Chiaroscuro Quartet and Cédric Tiberghien play Beethoven and Brahms

At Wigmore Hall a few days ago, a predictably superb concert. Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B flat Op. 130 with a (take-no-prisoners) Grosse Fuge Op. 133, followed by the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor Op. 34, with the plangent tones of the Chiaroscuro’s gut strings matched by Tiberghien’s vintage Bechstein. A wonderful distraction for a while from the woeful state of the world.

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