Peter Smith's Blog, page 138
August 20, 2010
Taking it slowly, #1
I have been rather quiet here, not because life has been so wildly over-exciting as to distract me from blogging but for the opposite reason. Nowt much happening.
My Faculty office is, at the moment, out of bounds as the builders are in my end of the Raised Faculty Building stripping out and replacing the heating system. ("Why wasn't it done when the building was refurbished not so many years ago?" Jolly good question. And next summer they are going to replace all the windows, so that will...
July 22, 2010
Sounding off, rather a lot
Oops. I've now sounded off over two hundred times on Ask Philosophers.
Well, doing that is a more productive form of procrastination than some alternatives that I could mention. And Ask Philosophers is a Good Thing. I can warmly recommend the philosophical good sense and humanity of many of my co-panellists (particularly Louise Antony, Richard Heck, Thomas Pogge, and Allen Stairs).
The Bertrand Russell Professorship
When I moved to Cambridge a dozen years ago, people asked why I wanted to leave Sheffield which was and is such a good department. "But aren't the attractions of Cambridge obvious?", I'd reply, "it's more work, less money, and astronomical house prices." (There's an explanation, then, for the noted tendency of Cambridge to appoint people with strong Cambridge connections: we are the ones daft enough to want to take the deal!)
The Bertrand Russell Professorship of Philosophy has now been...
July 11, 2010
One logician's iPad
There's a new page on this site, linked on the right, for anyone interested. And for the rest of you, I'll try henceforth to keep the blog an iPad-free zone.
Mind you, I'm only saying try …
July 10, 2010
Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries
To London yesterday. We had to be near Sloane Square, so we took the opportunity to visit the Saatchi Gallery. We were most impressed. With the Gallery. Unfortunately the contents are mostly a pile of crap. We can recommend the restaurant for a light lunch though. Especially if the sun is shining and you can sit under one of the umbrellas outside.
Later we spent a very enjoyable and instructive hour at the (sparsely attended, so pleasingly very quiet) free exhibition at the National Gallery,
July 7, 2010
Reading the iPad
Just a few thoughts, after five or six weeks of happy togetherness with my new iPad …
It is no wonder that we love our books: in reading them, we cradle them close to our heart.1
Yes. And we similarly cradle an iPad. Even the Apple cover, with which we lovingly protect it, is designed to make the iPad's hard shell seem softer and warmer in the hand — more like a book in fact. And the experience of reading on the iPad is as good as the tactile feel. Even those PDFs of articles you've...
July 3, 2010
PhilTeX group blog
One to watch if you are a philosophical LaTeX geek? — PhilTeX, a fairly new group blog on possibly relevant LaTeX matters. I've added links on the blogroll here and on the LaTeX for Logicians pages.
Philosophers with their minds on higher things.
Occasionally, I twitter links to The Daughter's wonderful cooking blog (parse that either way: it is both a wonderful cooking-blog and also — since she takes after her mother — a wonderful-cooking blog). A couple of days ago, I posted this:
Dirty weekends in Paris versus wearing Playboy bunny ears in a cheap motel @rumandreason: http://bit.ly/aLPuWl
The Daughter is much amused to report that this teasing pointer — read very largely by philosophers who follow the tweets (or the emphera here...
June 30, 2010
Field: what am I missing?
As I mentioned in the last post, it fell to me to introduce the last two chapters in Part III of Field — namely, Ch. 17 in which he rounds out his key technical construction, and Ch. 18, 'What Has Been Done'. And having got to the end of Field's core presentation of his story, we are going to call it a day. Since it was the last meeting, I took my cue from Ch. 18 and offered some very quickly written reflections on what has (or rather hasn't) been achieved. Here they are. Comments more than ...
June 29, 2010
Field, revised again
A few survivors are still battling through Field's desperately ill-written Saving Truth from Paradox in a reading group here (just on the matter of writing, contrast, e.g. Scott Soames beautifully lucid book Understanding Truth). We are going to stop having got a reasonable sense of Field's positive proposals. I think it is fair to say he isn't carrying conviction! Clever, no doubt: but the techno-flash isn't generating philosophical insight. It falls to me to try to introduce the last...
