"Academic Publishing as Economic Parasitism" post at NEWAPPS

Catarina Dutilh Novaes hits the nail on the head HERE.

I have nothing to add but agreement. Academic presses are, with few exceptions (the few which have made their texts available open access, or which have at least kept their prices low, as Dover has), an obsolete and parasitic farce. 

In a modest effort to exacerbate their obsolescence, or at least remove some of the obstacles to scholarship that they currently present, I would like to use this blog, or perhaps some affiliated website, as something of an AAAAARG.ORG-like resource, gathering together some of the texts that we, the Form & Formalism group, and our readers would like have access to. I'd like to put together something which does for our neck of the woods --- which is what? mostly (but not exclusively) 'continental' philosophy of mathematics and logic, I suppose? -- what AAAAARG is already (and admirably) doing for what seems to be a mostly cultural studies and continental political philosophy community.

Now, I could certainly put together a blog listing links to downloadable pdfs via sites like ifileit, etc., but maybe something more elegant could be built. I don't have much in the way of expertise in these matters, so any ideas or assistance you can offer, dear reader, will be welcome. 

Conference Announcement: HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTING at Ghent

Don't let the 75th anniversary of Church, Post and Turing's 1936 papers pass you by without any philosophical ado:

Jean-Yves Girard, TOWARDS A GEOMETRY OF INTERACTION

This essay of Girard's is a rare thing of beauty. It is sheer genius. Bold, sweeping, profound, and yet incredibly accessible and coherent, not just the scattered gnomic gunshots typical of Girard's later writings, which demand the reader to pay for their brilliance with painstaking mathematical and philosophical gap-filling. I plan to write a longer post about this text in the near future, and about the broader programme for a Geometry of Interaction in general, but for now, I ask you to read this beautiful, brilliant essay:


Girard - Towards a Geometry of Interaction

Paul Livingston's THE POLITICS OF LOGIC

So long as academic presses continue to jail our books behind prices like this, I consider anyone who's not making their work available online to be a fool. Paul Livingston, who is not a fool, has just released his excellent book, The Politics of Logic, to you, dear readers. [UPDATE: THE MANUSCRIPT IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE AT THIS URL. PAUL CAN, HOWEVER, BE REACHED HERE.] The book is a fascinating piece of work, which conscripts the conceptual achievements of analytic philosophy -- and, in particular, of that artery of analytic philosophy that has developed a sustained and brilliant reflection on the aporias of structure and language -- to the ends of compiling and illuminating an "orientation of thought" that can compete with Badiou on Badiou's own territory -- what Livingston dubs the "paradoxico-critical orientation". The main gist is something like this: what Gödel's incompleteness theorems throw into dramatic relief is not a simple obligation to accept incompleteness (of any formal system capable of expressing arithmetic, etc.), but the need to make a decision between inconsistency and incompleteness. Badiou's conditioning of his philosophy by mathematics, and principally by the metamathematical and foundational results of Gödel, Skolem, Cohen and others, elides this decision, and so passes over the possibility of the capacity for a rigorous -- and "complete" -- but essentially inconsistent discipline of formal thought to condition philosophy. Against Badiou's vision of the absolutely multiple, Livingston aims to deploy a vision of the paradoxical one, while retaining the ideal of conceiving radical situational change through the lens of formal thought. To this end, the book interweaves a sympathetic and subtle, but at bottom antagonistic reading of Badiou's work with a meditation on the foundations of mathematics and logic, and an invigorating synthesis of Wittgenstein and Agamben, Gödel and Derrida, and others.

Now go and read it [LINK BROKEN] for free.

Conference Announcement: Classical Model of Science II

Starting this evening at 20:15 with a lecture by the great philosopher of mathematics Stewart Shapiro [[UPDATE: SHAPIRO'S TALK HAS BEEN MOVED TO TOMORROW (WED.) MORNING AT 9:45. SCHLIESSER WILL BE SPEAKING TONIGHT ON SPINOZA, INSTEAD]], and running through to Friday (when Paolo Mancosu, historian of mathematics and editor of the indispensable anthology, From Brouwer to Hilbert, and Hourya Sinaceur, a brilliant philosopher of mathematics in the tradition of Cavaillès and author of Fields and Models, will both be speaking, among many others), the AXIOM group is hosting its second conference on "the Classical Model of Science", subtitled, "The Axiomatic Method, the Order of Concepts and the Hierarchy of Sciences from Leibniz to Tarski". The conference is taking place at the Vrije Universiteit Amstersdam, in the Philosophy Department. The conference programme, with schedule and abstracts, can be found here in pdf form. 

H/T to NewAPPS blog for the reminder.

Fernando Zalamea Seminar in Maastricht, Netherlands

It's official: Fernando Zalamea will be delivering a long-awaited English-language seminar on his recent work at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (The Netherlands) this September, through the Versus Laboratory. As some of this blog's readers may know, I'm currently working on a translation of his 2009 book, Filosofía sintética de las matemáticas contemporaneas, for Urbanomic press, a few chapters of which we'll be reading for the seminar. Zalamea is an extraordinarily original philosopher with a vision of mathematical activity as deep and sweeping as any philosopher since Albert Lautman. If the resurgence of the mathematical condition into contemporary 'continental' philosophy is something that interests you, then this seminar is well worth the train to Maastricht. Like all JVE events, admission is free and open to the public. Here is the announcement from the Versus Laboratory page:

Sheaf Logic & Philosophical Synthesis

Thursday 29 September 2011
14h to 17h Auditorium

Fernando Zalamea (Universidad Nacional de Columbia), philosopher and mathematician, will illustrate how today’s sheaf logic carries a potential to revolutionize contemporary philosophical practice in a manner no less radical than the force with which the early 20th Century formalization of classical logic conditioned the practice of Analytic Philosophy. In particular, we will study a series of Grothendieck transformations of mathematical concepts, and come to understand how analogous procedures may be employed to the end of overturning a number of traditional philosophical polarities (realism/idealism, statics/dynamics, form/content, etc.).

Texts: Fernando ZALAMEA, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, trans. Z.L. Fraser, London: Urbanomic, 2012. Chapters 4, 8 and 9. Copies of the readings will be made available here at the end of August. 

Information on the book (forthcoming from Urbanomic) can be found here.

* In other Zalamea-related news, Reza Negarestani has recently mentioned plans for a series of introductory posts on Zalamea's work on his own blog, Eliminative Culinarism, which I highly recommend readers of this blog take a look at when they're up. Zalamea also has an article in the most recent volume of COLLAPSE, which I'm still waiting to get my hands on. [[UPDATE: NEGARESTANI'S INTRODUCTORY POST ON ZALAMEA'S PROJECT IS NOW UP, AND CAN BE FOUND HERE.]]

Georg Cantor's 1883 "Grundlagen" article

Several years ago in Halifax, I found this translation of Cantor's 1883 article "On Infinite Linear Point Manifolds". The text comes from a set of mimeographed typewritten translations of three of Cantor's foundational papers on set theory and transfinite numbers, typewritten and mimeographed, it seems, in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley in 1941. The translator we have to thank for this is named George Bingley, though I haven't been able to find out any more information about him.

Of the three texts included in the manuscript, two are already available in English in the decently priced Dover volume. The third, as far as I know, is not [[CORRECTION: as far as I knew it was not available in English. It turns out that it is, in another translationin the 2nd volume of the mammoth and fantastically useful anthology entitled From Kant to Hilbert).]] Milner's French translation of the text appeared in Vol. 10 of the Cahiers pour l'analyse and can be found here.

Cantor - Grundlagen