Survey of Logic for Philosophers
PHIL 76500
CUNY Graduate Center
Program in Philosophy
Spring semester 2016
4 credits
Weds. 11:45-1:45
Room 5417

This seminar will be a graduate-level survey of topics in logic for philosophers, including propositional logic, modal logic, predicate logic, model theory, completeness, incompleteness, computability theory, set theory and the higher infinite. The material will thus be a mixture of philosophical logic and mathematical logic, and a goal of the course will be to develop the student’s ability to treat the main ideas of logic with clarity and precision.

Students will solve weekly problem sets and write a final paper on a topic chosen in consultation with me.

Students talks on their research projects. The students will give brief talks on their research paper topics on May 25, 2016, 11:45-1:45 in GC 5417. I will post titles and abstracts here when I get them. Among the topics will be the following and others:

• The problem of aggregating individual preferences to a group preference relation
• The logic of missing information
• The hierarchy of expressive power of sets of classical connectives
• Recovering the accessibility relation from the modal theories of the worlds in a Kripke model
• The fundamental theorem of finite games of perfect information
• Multi-valued modal logic
• Definability via category theory
• Discernibility and indiscernibility in a language without equality
• Modal predicate logic and the Barcan formula