Announcements

• My (JM’s) office hours are cancelled on Monday May 12. I will hold office hours Thursday May 15, 10 AM - noon, and Monday May 19, 10 AM - noon.

• The final examination will take place on Tuesday, May 20, from 5–8 PM, in 110 Wheeler Hall.

• At Fabrizio’s suggestion, I’ve moved the paper due date back to May 14. Earlier submissions are of course welcome.

• I’ve rearranged the schedule by removing the lecture on “Biscuit Conditionals,” moving up the material on vagueness, and leaving a day at the end for review or catchup. This does not affect the due date for the final paper, which is still May 8.

• You may want to look at section 2 of Prawitz’s Remarks on Some Approaches to the Concept of Logical Consequence, Synthese 62 (1985), 153–171. In some respects it is clearer and easier to follow than the article in your reader.

• I’ve updated the schedule.

• For more on the slingshot argument, you might look at my review of Stephen Neale’s book Facing Facts.

• Smullyan’s article “Modality and Description” is very clear and readable, but you may encounter a few difficulties with his notation. He uses the notational conventions of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. A few things to note:

  • ‘E!’ is a predicate meaning ‘exists’.
  • ‘Fu ≡ _uGu’ is short for ‘∀u(Fu ≡ Gu)’.
  • a dot (’.’) might be either a conjunction (same as our ‘ ∧ ’) or a punctuation mark. The dots do work we would do using parentheses. For an explanation of this confusing notation, due to Russell and Whitehead, look here.

• I’ve revised the schedule (as of Feb. 11). The first problem set will be due Tuesday Feb. 19.

• On Thursday (Jan. 31) we will get a basic introduction to generalized quantifiers and Russell’s theory of descriptions. If you want to learn more about these topics, you might look at the following sources:

  • Michael Glanzberg’s article on Quantifiers for the Oxford Handbook for the Philosophy of Language.
  • Stephen Neale’s book Descriptions (MIT Press, 1990).
  • Dag Westerstål’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on generalized quantifiers.
  • Peter Ludlow’s SEP article on definite descriptions.

• Fabrizio has put up a section home page that contains sections times and places and much more.

• Your first assignment is to do the exercises in the reviews of propositional and predicate logic (available on the Handouts page). You’ll turn these in next week in section. They won’t be graded, but you must do them.

• If you’re interested in how I typeset Fitch-style proofs in my handouts, see the LaTeX page. You might also think about taking the DeCal class on LaTeX.