Since I last said anything on The Alphabet of Being, I’ve been up to quite a lot. Some of this consisted in being ill, other bits of it involved political activity and trips to the south coast. But there was plenty of philosophical interest as well. A highlight was visiting the Foundations of Logical Consequence group at Arche. It was really good to spend some time with this exciting project, which is investigating what is perhaps the question in philosophy of logic – what is the nature of the consequence relation(s)? Whilst I was there, we had an excellent selection of seminar speakers (ignoring the fellow on the 26th April), and worked our way through Greg Restall’s book on substructural logics.

Projects seem to abound in British logic at the moment, and the exciting news is that a new one is starting at Birkbeck this term – details of Øystein Linnebo’s project Plurals, Predicates, and Paradox : Towards a Type-Free Account are here. Given my PhD topic, I’m thrilled that this is happening at Birkbeck. It was good to be involved in an initial workshop earlier this year.

I am going to attempt to return to my initial plan to use this blog for a combination of reflection, news, and posting interesting links. This is the final year of my AHRC doctoral award, and I am aiming to get the thesis near completion by the end of the academic year. As a consequence, my posts may be infrequent. I am also going to experiment in consolidating my web-presence. My thoughts, such as they are, on politics and religion will be kept philosophical in character, and posted here.

Now let’s see how long that resolution lasts.

We, the students and friends of the Philosophy Department at King’s College London, present on this website a letter in response to the events initiated by the Management of King’s in recent days. The implementation of the proposals will result in job losses for three valued and widely respected academics in the faculty; Professor Shalom Lappin, Doctor Wilfried Meyer-Viol, and Professor Charles Travis and more broadly, the restructuring requires all faculty members in the School of Humanities to reapply for their own positions with a view to making further redundancies.

The main body of the letter is divided into four argumentative parts. These parts cover:

* An objection to the rationale behind the already-threatened redundancies of two esteemed members of the faculty and the refusal renew the contract of a third.
* Arguments that the decision-making process has left neither students nor staff in a position to rationally accept the more general proposal of “restructuring”
* Concerns regarding both transparency issues arising from the nature of the ‘consultation’ process that we apparently are now in and the fact that no alternative options have openly been discussed by the Management.
* Arguments that the proposed redundancies will not only adversely affect current students and staff, but that they will demolish the reputation of Philosophy at King’s College, which is not only currently one of the top three philosophy departments in the country, but is also deemed world-class.

We hope that you will be able to offer your support by signing up to the letter.

* The Students of the King’s College Philosophy Department
* Department of Philosophy
* King’s College London
* Strand
* London
* WC2R 2LS

Well done to them for this. If Kings’ management get away with these sackings, it will be bad for the college, bad for London, bad for philosophy, and bad for the status of formal subdisciplines within the subject. The letter is here. Please sign it.

I had a few installation issues installing on my desktop, since the Linux support for Dropbox (excellent that this exists at all, of course) is geared towards the Nautilus file manager for GNOME, whereas I am running KDE. There are few tech problems, however, which cannot be solved by recourse to the internet..

If anyone wants to follow my lead, I’m very happy to send out invites. Email me or something.

British universities are being transformed by people who misunderstand everything about academic work. The transformation is of course merely a part of a transformation of society as a whole. The official stance of the ideologues is that they do not believe in any such thing as society; in point of fact, however, they do not believe in anything else. They are concerned, for example, with the performance of ‘the economy’: not with whether individual people are prospering, but with the economy as a distinguishable system on its own. The successful performance of the economy will grossly enrich some, and deprive others of all hope or comfort: but the aim, if one is not to take a cynical view of it, cannot be either to reward those who scramble to the top of the economic mountain or to punish those who are cast on the scrapheap at its foot, but simply to ensure efficient functioning of the economy as such. The vision which the ideologues have of the successful functioning of the economy or of any other social mechanism is that it works well only if operated by human beings engaged in ruthlessly biting and clawing their way to the top, where they will be able to obtain a disproportionate share of limited rewards. For this purpose, the people so competing with one another should not be encouraged to believe in the good of anything but themselves as individuals; if they were to believe in society as a whole, they might form ideas about protecting the weak or unfortunate that would clog the efficiency of the system. A glance at the universities as they used to be revealed a social sector not functioning in this manner; it therefore obviously could not be functioning efficiently, or justifying the money spent on it, and hence must be transformed in accordance with the model decreed by ideology.

And what Thatcher began, Mandelson seems intent on completing.

Completely unrelated, but nonetheless also cool, is this video:

If only it had existed when I was teaching this stuff earlier in the term.

I voted, however, with not a little hesitancy. I accept classical logic as the right logic (indeed as Logic, with a capital ‘L’) in the following, robustly realist sense: I think that the laws of truth obtaining between propositions are classical, and are so in virtue of the most formal features of reality. Does this mean I don’t ‘accept’ non-classical logic? Clearly not, for many values of ‘accept’. Suppose we are studying consequence within a natural language which has gappy or glutty sentences – a nonclassical system is going to be appropriate for this. Or suppose I want to study the preservation of some nice feature (other than truth) within an inconsistent theory. LP or one of its spawn is going to be just the ticket. And then there are questions about which systems are suitable for various purposes in computer science. And so on.

So, I’m not really clear about what ‘accepting’ a formal system involves. I also suspect that those answering the survey may have varied in their understanding of what is involved in a logic being classical. There is a distinction to be made between logics which extend uncontroversially classical systems (an example here would be normal modal logics) and those which revise those systems (such as intuitionistic logic). If a significant number of respondents considered the former to be within the extension of ‘nonclassical logic’, then the 17.7% figure might be of dubious deep philosophical interest.

Which rambling ambivalent response is my way of saying that it would be interesting to see some more fine-grained questions about logic choice in the next survey.

The thing I like best about the concept of a philosophy band, however, is that I can write things like this and lie to myself that I am doing philosophy. Lying, or rather not lying, is what I should be thinking about. I’ve set myself the reading week project of looking at truth-tellers. This sentence is true. The previous sentence is an example of a truth-teller. It strikes us that there is something out of order about truth-tellers. Getting an idea of what that something is might shed light on the nature of truth and its groundedness, and could just help us tackle the infamous cousin of truth-tellers, the Liar.