Peter Smith's Blog, page 47

More music for lockdown 4: the Doric Quartet play Mozart and Beethoven

There is another wonderful series of concerts being streamed from Wigmore Hall. I particularly enjoyed this from the very fine Doric Quartet, playing Mozart’s Quartet K590, the ‘Prussian’, and Beethoven’s first Razumovsky Quartet.

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Another new paper by Kripke: The Collapse of the Hilbert Program

In case you missed it — as I did until Romina Padro pointed me to it — Saul Kripke published another new paper on arXiv last month, The Collapse of the Hilbert Program: A Variation on the Gödelian Theme.

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Procrastinating with Logicbites …

I’ve just been checking the February figures for downloads from Logic Matters and for sales of the print-on-demand versions of the Big Red Logic Books.

The sales — modest! — of the physical books fluctuate quite a bit. But last month’s best seller was Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. Interestingly, the sales have gone up since I also made that book freely available as a PDF download. Make of that what you will!The most popular download of the three books (and second most popular download overall) was IFL2 , which was downloaded just over a 1000 times. Who knows how it is being received? It is one of the better intro logic books out there, and it certainly beats most of the competition on price! I’ve newly added a page on the front of the PDF version warmly encouraging comments/feedback from readers. We’ll see.But more popular still was Logic: A Study Guide which was downloaded just over 2000 times. This rate is pretty consistent over the months. Lots of people must be being pointing students to it — but I haven’t much idea who is doing the pointing and where and why. But it does mean I need to continue working on the as-yet-unrevised chapters.The third most popular download — and this really is puzzling, though again is pretty consistent — is what used to be the Appendix to the old Teach Yourself Logic Guide, which brings together notes on some seventeen of the Big Books on Mathematical Logic (I haven’t updated this for some time).The next most popular PDF was the second part of the Study Guide (the as-yet-unrevised chapters), closely followed by the Gentle Introduction to categories, downloaded 550 times. As I’ve said before, this really is getting embarrassing; I must take my increasingly stiff and inflexible brain back to the gym and do some category fitness training, so I can revise/finish off that document in a way I don’t feel too ashamed by!So far, the Logicbites I’ve just been recently writing — the introductory chats to chapters of IFL2 — have hardly been downloaded at all. It is very early days, however, and I’ll have to see in due course whether there is much interest. The plan is for three series of IFL Logicbites, one on the propositional logic chapters (not including the chapters on natural deduction), one on quantification theory (again not including ND), and one on natural deduction. I should finish the first series this week. I’ll then pause to decide whether it is worth writing up more.

Actually, I have rather enjoyed doing the (not-very-challenging!) homework involved in writing those early Logicbites, looking at how others have handled various introductory  themes in elementary logic, and thinking a bit too about how things might be improved in a perhaps-to-be-written IFL3. OK, that’s been procrastinating when I should really have been getting back to revising the Logic Guide and the Gentle Introduction. But it is productively structured procrastination.

One sidetrack I’ve been (re)exploring after a long time, also partly prompted by Jonathan Barnes’s Logical Matters, is Aristotle’s logic — I mean the real thing, not the travesty that you get in logic books like Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic (which of course nowhere discusses what Aristotle cared about, the systematization of his meta logical investigations). It would be good to weave a few such Aristotelian threads into IFL3.

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New paper by Kripke (on mathematical incompleteness results in PA)

There is a new paper by Saul Kripke on “Mathematical Incompleteness Results in First-Order Peano Arithmetic: A Revisionist View of the Early History”, available here on arXiv. Thanks to David Auerbach for the heads-up.

This blog gets a mention. I went wrong on the history in the first edition of IGT. Not, I fear, that I do a lot better in the second edition …

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Logical Matters

How did I miss that the second volume of Jonathan Barnes’s papers on ancient philosophy goes by the title Logical Matters? A must read, surely, for Logic Matters!

Better late than never, following a thread that started some days ago when reading Susanne Bobzien’s piece on Frege and the Stoics, I found myself led to a couple of long pieces by Barnes, not easy to get hold of. So now — really rather extravagantly, but lockdown rather reduces the opportunities for other extravagances — his 800 page book of collected essays has arrived on my desk. I’ve already read a couple of hundred pages with real pleasure and considerable enlightenment. It isn’t in fact taking me far from themes I’ve been worrying about, thinking again around and about my intro logic book with a distant third edition in mind.  After all, the ancients — Aristotle, the Stoics (such as we have them), the ancient commentators — were concerned with logical basics. They were wrestling with ideas of consequence, of form, of predication and so on; and thinking through their struggles can’t but help throw some sidelight on modern preoccupations when we (re)turn to basics. For example, I found Barnes’s hundred page paper on ‘Logical form and logical matter’, much of it keeping company with the ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias, genuinely instructive.

Collections of papers like this don’t seem to get reviewed. Do they just fall as dead weights onto the shelves of libraries with generous funding? This one doesn’t even seem to have been made available by OUP in its online “Oxford Scholarship” service. That’s more than a pity. Barnes’s logical papers have been very scattered so need to be brought together like this to be more available; his voice is engaging, many of his topics of considerable interest, his discussions seem insightful (though I’m no classic!); the work collected here surely adds up in a very impressive way. And as I said, it is far from being just of interest to those working specifically on ancient philosophy. Do look it out!

(It is just rather depressing to reflect that this is only one of four similarly sized volumes of collected papers. To be added to an equally impressive sequence of earlier books …)

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More music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić

It’s been often remarked, how odd our experience of time is in lockdown. The days are long; the weeks disappear so quickly. It seems just a few days since I watched a hugely enjoyable concert by the painist Ivana Gavrić playing Grieg, with great warmth and humanity, in the intimate setting of a lovely drawing room. I was about to put up a link where you could subscribe to the archived recording … and it has sadly gone.

Sorry about that. However, all is not lost! For a start, you can still of course get her captivating 2013 Grieg CD (“Everything glows with affection” said the Gramophone). And even better, there are still two more concerts to come in her current online series. You can get details here (where you can buy tickets for the live stream: the concert then becomes available for a while on City Music’s archive). I’m particularly looking forward to the second of these, when Ivana Gavrić will be playing early Schubert and Janacek — I so admire her earlier recording of the Janacek, which made me fall in love with the music, and her only recording of Schubert so far is really very fine too. Two forthcoming concerts to relish, then.

The post More music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić appeared first on Logic Matters.

Music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić

It’s been often remarked, how odd our experience of time is in lockdown. The days are long; the weeks disappear so quickly. It seems just a few days since I watched a hugely enjoyable concert by the painist Ivana Gavrić playing Grieg, with great warmth and humanity, in the intimate setting of a lovely drawing room. I was about to put up a link where you could subscribe to the archived recording … and it has sadly gone.

Sorry about that. However, all is not lost! For a start, you can still of course get her captivating 2013 Grieg CD (“Everything glows with affection” said the Gramophone). And even better, there are still two more concerts to come in her current online series. You can get details here (where you can buy tickets for the live stream: the concert then becomes available for a while on City Music’s archive). I’m particularly looking forward to the second of these, when Ivana Gavrić will be playing early Schubert and Janacek — I so admire her earlier recording of the Janacek, which made me fall in love with the music, and her only recording of Schubert so far is really very fine too. Two forthcoming concerts to relish, then.

The post Music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić appeared first on Logic Matters.

More logicbites

There are now 10 logicbites, very much intended for students. They introduce Chapters 1 to 10 of IFL, varying from one page to five, often quoting from other people’s textbooks (and sometimes criticizing them!).

I’ve found it surprisingly fun to go back, in most cases after many years, looking at how others have handled introductory topics. My book is very far from perfect, and needs a third edition (yes, really); but I can see why I was originally moved to write it, back in the day!

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More music for lockdown 2: Chiaroscuro Quartet play more Haydn

In these troubled times, I do find Haydn’s music a particular delight and solace (I’m surely not alone in this!). Particularly the inexhaustible quartets. Four years ago, we had two outstanding CDs of the Op. 20 quartets from the Chiaroscuro Quartet, on gut strings with what has become the quartet’s distinctive and addictive sound. And then last year, to equal acclaim, they released a recording of the first three of the Op. 76 quartets. Now we have the remaining three quartets. This has already been Radio 3’s new release of the week. It really is extraordinarily fine. All the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s virtues are here. Appropriately to their name, all their constrasts of light and shade, now exuberant, now subtly serious, passionate and then playful again, make for quite wonderful listening. Indisputably great music played by what is now an indisputably great quartet.

The post More music for lockdown 2: Chiaroscuro Quartet play more Haydn appeared first on Logic Matters.

Music for lockdown 2: Chiaroscuro Quartet play more Haydn

In these troubled times, I do find Haydn’s music a particular delight and solace (I’m surely not alone in this!). Particularly the inexhaustible quartets. Four years ago, we had two outstanding CDs of the Op. 20 quartets from the Chiaroscuro Quartet, on gut strings with what has become the quartet’s distinctive and addictive sound. And then last year, to equal acclaim, they released a recording of the first three of the Op. 76 quartets. Now we have the remaining three quartets. This has already been Radio 3’s new release of the week. It really is extraordinarily fine. All the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s virtues are here. Appropriately to their name, all their constrasts of light and shade, now exuberant, now subtly serious, passionate and then playful again, make for quite wonderful listening. Indisputably great music played by what is now an indisputably great quartet.

The post Music for lockdown 2: Chiaroscuro Quartet play more Haydn appeared first on Logic Matters.