PLM Reviews

Introduction This post is a little different from some of my others. It started as a review of Greg Restall's paper "Carnap's Tolerance, Meaning, and Logical Pluralism", but a few factors convinced me to shift my focus towards replying to a specific point, rather than reviewing the paper as a whole.  First, a great deal of what I had to say about the paper related to this particular argument against Carnapian logical pluralism (a view that's quite close to my own). I largely either agree or have no present thoughts on the rest of the paper. In particular, Restall aims to set out how his view (and that of Beall) is different from Carnap's. He does that quite successfully and I'm certainly more clear on the nature of his position as a result of reading the paper. Second, I had a paper R&R'd by a journal a few weeks back. The result was that my timetable was suddenly thrown off balance and I needed to find a way both to work on my current paper (a pap...

  Introduction I've recently switched my focus back towards the philosophy of logic from the philosophy of maths as I have a paper on logical pluralism that I'd like to re-work and submit somewhere over the summer. My paper, in part, draws on Christopher Blake-Turner's co-author work with Gillian Russell (who I believe was the supervisor of his recently completed doctoral thesis). Given that (1) I like his previous work, (2) that I have a preference for reviewing the work of early-career philosophers and (3) that I prefer to review recent work when I saw that Blake-Turner has a forthcoming paper in Philosophical Studies, it seemed like a natural target for a review. The paper is very interesting and of generally high quality. My biggest "macro" criticism is that it feels like two papers, not one. The material about the basing of reasons stands largely independently from the material about the collapse problem, neither really affects the other, though both contribu...

Introduction Around 18 months ago my supervisor, Georg Schiemer, and I were catching up about the state of my work whilst taking a short walk through Vienna. Towards the end of this walk, Georg asked me if I was planning on submitting to a conference he was organising: the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy (SSHAP). I said about it but, now that he mentioned it, I did have a short little paper I was meaning to write on the history of Mathematical Formalism, why it fell out of fashion and why I thought David Lewis would have made a good Formalist. Georg liked the idea and so I wrote it. The paper was only ever supposed to be a bit of fun; more catharsis than serious scholarship as I think most of the serious points regarding Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and Formalism were already well known by philosophers of maths. Alan Weir, for instance, has clarified most of this in several places. Nevertheless, the David Lewis connections were (...

  Introduction This was an interesting paper by Luca Incurvati and I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. We read this paper as part of our weekly philosophy of maths reading group at the University of Vienna. My thanks, in alphabetical order, to Julie Lauvsland, Benjamin Marschall and Simon Weisgerber. In particular, thanks to Julie for suggesting the paper. This is, though, the first paper I've reviewed where I've generally disagreed with the author. It's not that I necessarily disagree with all the conclusions, but I think there responses that Incurvati doesn't consider and alternative arguments that are important. I'm also unconvinced by Incurvati's positive proposal. Now one quasi-objection I have is that the paper takes place from a Platonist/realist perspective. I think that's wrong from the start and is bound to lead to confusion when we worry about which axioms or claims about sets are really  correct and why. I think we should choose our concept of ...