Today my advanced seminar switched gears from the formal logic we've been doing since October to philosophy of math. I still want the presentations to be student-given, but it's very different covering a chapter of philosophy, including motivating discussion, than it is covering a bunch of technical definitions, lemmas, proofs, etc., so I wasn't ( Read more... )

....except not quite.

One thing I love about teaching is getting to revisit old favorites from my own undergrad days. When my 2nd years last year indicated they wanted to do some philosophy of math this year, I knew exactly what book to go to -- Stewart Shapiro's Thinking About Mathematics, which I had as a textbook in Mike Byrd's grad-level ( Read more... )

The worst part about school? School holidays...which OF COURSE do not match up with academic holidays. When Gwen was at nursery, nursery was open every day that the university was open, with the exception of the first May bank holiday (I never understood why, of the two May bank holidays, academic staff, including nursery staff, got both of them ( Read more... )

Back in spring I joined an "Academic Mamas" group on FB, and it's been quite interesting. One thing that has recently come to the fore, in many different threads, is what students should call their teachers. There are a lot of people in the group who are very exercised by ensuring that their students call them "Prof. X" or "Dr. X" and not "hey [ ( Read more... )

Inspired by my success at Logic Colloquium last month, I decided today that not only was I going to not go back to my hotel to hide instead of having dinner, I was going to make sure I had dinner with someone. (Two important facts: One, the conference ran from 9am to 7pm with too few coffee breaks in the afternoon. Two, there's a restaurant in my ( Read more... )

Monday and Tuesday I went down to Leeds for Logic Colloquium. It runs until Saturday morning, but we leave for Raglan on Saturday morning, and I have enough stuff to do, that it didn't make sense to stay for the whole conference. My talk was at the end of the day on Monday, after which I couldn't have gotten home early enough for Joel to get ( Read more... )

It's not that I haven't been writing, it's that I've been writing A LOT, just elsewhere. Most of it here, but some of it here and here, plus academic writing, and trying to put in my 400 words regularly. Plus another writing thing, which will get another post. I had once made the decision not to fragment, that I would write everything here, but ( Read more... )

Last year I joined twitter, and starting butting my head into other people's conversations (because that's what twitter appears to be). As a result of this, I received an invitation to come to Munich, give a talk, and be interviewed for the History of Philosophy Without Gaps podcast (the episode is not yet available). The talk I gave in Munich ( Read more... )

You know, every time I visit https://www.dur.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/ and see my name listed there, I am taken aback. I am surprised that this ever happened ( Read more... )

Back in March I received an email telling me I'd been nominated by my head of department to attend a fancy "Excellence in Research" dinner up at the Castle early the next term, and that I should prepare a poster or an exhibit or something related to my research as there would be a little symposium for an hour before the dinner. I had a vague idea ( Read more... )