Wolfgang Schwarz

Blog
< 807 older entriesHome

Teaching mathematical logic

I taught two courses this year that I haven't taught before. One of them was our 4th-year undergraduate course on mathematical logic, "Logic, Computability, and Incompleteness". As usual, I ended up writing my own textbook. Here it is as PDF and here as HTML.

Why yet another textbook? Two reasons mainly. One is that many existing textbooks are addressed at maths students. This shows up not only in the examples and illustrations, but also in the fact that comparatively little time is spent motivating, explaining, and discussing definitions, proof ideas, or results. I wanted more of that.

The tyranny of the objective

A widely held view in philosophy is that ordinary information and ordinary belief are concerned with "objective" propositions whose truth-value doesn't vary between perspectives or locations within a world.

Some hold that all genuine content is objective, and that the appearance of counterexamples is an illusion that can somehow be explained away. (See, e.g., Stalnaker 1981, Magidor 2015, or Cappelen and Dever 2013.) Even those who accept that there is genuinely perspectival or self-locating information tend to treat it as a special case that requires special rules for integration with ordinary, non-perspectival information. (See, e.g., Bostrom 2002, Meacham 2008, Moss 2012, Titelbaum 2013, Builes 2020, or Isaacs, Hawthorne, and Russell 2022).

< 807 older entriesHome