I’m teaching an advanced philosophy of language course next semester, and I’ve decided to focus on issues in the philosophy of language where it helps to have some technical background. The idea of the course will be to alternate between time spent doing techie stuff – which will be assessed by way of problem sets – and time spent doing philosophy that relates to the techie stuff, which will be assessed by way of papers.

We’re going to start out with some modal logic, and I’m wondering about textbooks. I’ve actually already put my request in to the bookstore to get some copies of the latest Hughes and Cresswell, but since then my collegue José has suggested that I switch to this book by Fitting and Mendelsohn instead. And at a first glance, it does look pretty promising, and it contains exercises and – this is important, I think – among the proof systems it employs are axiomatic systems. I remark on this because in the last couple of years there have been several logic textbooks – by authors who I otherwise love and respect – which use tableaux as the main proof method. And that isn’t what I want.

But it’s hard to know whether a logic textbook is good from a cursory glance. (They’re kind of like universal statements; you can know that one is bad from a single data point, but knowing that one is good is very difficult.) So I was wondering, have any of you used the Fitting and Mendelsohn book? Do you have any thoughts about it, or other similar books?

Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Socrates and the Laws of Athens”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/article_view?parent=browse&sortby=date&last_results=&browse_id=635171&article_id=phco_articles_bpl046 for “Philosophy Compass”:http://compass.bw.semcs.net/subject/philosophy/.

bq. The claim that the citizen’s duty is to “persuade or obey” the laws, expressed by the personified Laws of Athens in Plato’s _Crito_, continues to receive intense scholarly attention. In this article, we provide a general review of the debates over this doctrine, and how the various positions taken may or may not fit with the rest of what we know about Socratic philosophy. We ultimately argue that the problems scholars have found in attributing the doctrine to Socrates derive from an anachronistic and erroneous understanding of Socrates as a kind of libertarian.

“Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org/ is putting together a cross-disclipinary introductory formal logic course, and is looking for “suggestions from anyone who has done something similar”:http://consequently.org/news/2006/11/15/horn_tooting.

Over at Crooked Timber a while ago I posted something on the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. I mentioned this to some people at Rutgers last weekend, and now “Jonathan Ichikawa”:http://jollyutter.net/wp/?p=628 has a nice post arguing in favour of a wide-scope interpretation of the ‘self-evident’ operator.

Here’s a “nice story”:http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/18/71C28/index.xml?section=featured in the _Princeton Weekly Bulletin_ on Elizabeth and Gilbert Harman, on being the first father-daughter pair to be on the faculty at the same time. The authors get several of their colleagues to say nice things about each Harman, which I’m sure wasn’t too hard a task! (Thanks to Pablo Stafforini for the link.)

This was noted on a few blogs a while ago, but I thought it would be useful to remind everyone of Josh Dever’s “philosophy dissertations”:https://webspace.utexas.edu/deverj/personal/test/dissertations.html project. Josh aims to collect links to online philosophy dissertations. If your dissertation is posted, email him and he’ll add it to the list. For better or worse my dissertation isn’t online, but maybe I’ll think about changing that.

TAR is much less political than it used to be. But doing a bit of a public service announcement doesn’t seem like a misuse of the blog. The people named below are all Republican candidates in the upcoming elections. And the links in each case take you to a less than flattering story about the said candidate. (Although with some of these people, a random flick of the internet switch will find such an article.) So if you want more reason to disapprove of Jon Kyl, Rick Renzi, J.D. Hayworth, John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, Brian Bilbray, Marilyn Musgrave, Doug Lamborn, Rick O’Donnell, Christopher Shays, Vernon Buchanan, Joe Negron, Clay Shaw, Bill Sali, Peter Roskam, Mark Kirk, Dennis Hastert, Chris Chocola, John Hostettler, Mike Whalen, Jim Ryun, Anne Northup, Geoff Davis, Michael Steele, Gil Gutknecht, Michele Bachmann, Jim Talent, Conrad Burns, Jon Porter, Charlie Bass, Mike Ferguson, Heather Wilson, Peter King, John Sweeney, Tom Reynolds, Randy Kuhl, Robin Hayes, Charles Taylor, Steve Chabot, Jean Schmidt, Deborah Pryce, Joy Padgett, Melissa Hart, Curt Weldon, Mike Fitzpatrick, Don Sherwood, Lincoln Chafee, Bob Corker, George Allen, Frank Wolf, Mike McGavick, or Dave Reichert, just follow the links.