150 episodes listed below
Logic-driven philosophy talks, recorded with the room left in.
An archive of recorded academic talks, credited to LMU Munich, in which speakers bring logic and mathematics to bear on philosophical problems. The talks take on Carnap's handling of theoretical terms, modal logic seen through category theory, possibility without possible worlds, adaptive logics and two senses of coherence.
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MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy (Archive 2011/12) is a large archive of recorded academic talks, each opening with a one-line credit to LMU Munich. The premise is in the name. Philosophical questions are taken up with the tools of logic and mathematics, and the speakers argue through definitions, derivations and formal semantics. Carnap is the clearest recurring figure. One talk follows his approach to theoretical terms from his 1939 monograph Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, through the Ramsey sentence and Hilbert's epsilon operator, to Philosophical Foundations of Physics in 1966, a work based on a typescript of his 1958 UCLA seminar made by Martin Gardner. Its speaker opens by promising no Quine, a line aimed at the anti-Harvard people in the room. A second talk, 'Carnap on extremal axioms and categoricity', comes from a fellow of the center who came from Vienna and who points out the talk's close ties to a colleague's. Modality is the other strong thread. In 'Modality and Categories', a speaker whose main research area is category theory builds a category out of sets and functions in a few sentences, then observes that its unit and composition laws do the work that reflexivity and transitivity do for an ordering. The talk closes by suggesting modal logicians could both learn from and add to the study of adjunctions and monads. 'Possibilities without possible worlds/histories' approaches modality from another side. Possible worlds revolutionized philosophy from the 70s on, its speaker grants, but they are too crude a tool, and branching continuations are proposed as something subtler and more local that can still give a semantics for tense and modality. The range runs wider still. An introduction to adaptive logics is given by someone candid about not having invented them but who feels a duty to spread the word, and it ends on finitistic non-triviality proofs, full comprehension without losing too much classical mathematics, and an apology for running out of time. 'Three contrasts between two senses of coherence' opens with a Carnegie Mellon speaker recalling a long collaboration with two statistics colleagues that began in 1979, when a course dwindled to three people, and joking that each department counts the speaker as a member of the other. Expect density. Passages turn on terms like lower limit logic, marked lines and final derivability, and one speaker's promised pictures of Carnap cannot be seen on audio. The recordings keep the room as well: introductions, thanks, references to talks given earlier at the same gatherings. 'Modality and Categories' makes a good first listen, since its speaker stops to define the central idea before building on it. The two Carnap talks then make a natural pair.
Made for: Suits a listener already at home with formal logic who wants to hear technical talks on Carnap, modal logic, category theory and coherence as they were delivered, not summarized after the fact.
What sets it apart: It offers the talks themselves rather than interviews or recaps: formal arguments presented to a room, with introductions, cross-references to neighboring talks and dry asides left intact.
Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists.The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical metho…
A logical model gets cross-examined before you let its elegant proof win the argument.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A steady bridge from modal logic and Kripke frames to categories, sets, and logical structure.
Modality and Categories follows the link between modal logic and category theory, starting from the familiar ground of propositional modal logic before widening toward first-order logic.
A careful guide to reasoning that moves forward while leaving its conclusions open to revision.
Adaptive logics take on a wide brief: to formalize feasible reasoning in one system while also giving a normative account of rationality under uncertainty. The talk makes that goal concrete through derivation.
A focused lecture on logic as scientific modelling, where useful distortions bring both clarity and awkward consequences.
Logic as Modelling frames logic as a form of scientific modelling, then follows that idea into its working consequences. It separates Logic as a philosophical discipline from the particular logics built inside it, using the Bohr model of the atom as a clear point of comparison.
A measured challenge to the assumption that logical semantics already fits what it aims to model.
The fitting problem for logical semantics turns on a quiet assumption in mathematical philosophy: that a semantic system is an adequate model of the phenomenon it is meant to capture.
A Walter Pitts story opens into a careful case for why neuroscience still needs mathematical theory.
This episode shapes a lecture on science into a biographical route toward a bigger question: how mathematical and logical sophistication came to matter in thinking about the brain.
A psychiatrist's tour of fate, Jung and the afterlife.
Particle accelerators, compost piles and Queen's guitarist, all explained.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Long interviews with neuroscientists and philosophers on consciousness, decision-making, and whether AI is anything like a brain.
A talk at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy on Carnap's extremal axioms and categoricity, related to presyntax invariance.
A lecture on Frege's views on geometry and arithmetic, exploring the relationship between his philosophy and Kant's, and discussing non-Euclidean geometry.
At LMU Munich, the speaker uses "Modality and Categories" to connect category theory, Kripke frames, and modal logic.
MCMP - Mathematical Philosophy's archive talk on adaptive logics frames the field as a unified account of feasible reasoning rather than one isolated problem.
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy's "Logic as Modelling" argues that logic is "a species of scientific modelling," with the Bohr model of the atom as the comparison.
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy (Archive 2011/12) presents Hannes Leitke's Logic and the Brain as a lecture about whether logical inference and neural activity describe the same phenomenon.
["At LMU Munich, the speaker says he is doing 'the philosophy of mathematical philosophy,' not mathematical philosophy itself, and frames the talk as a methodological audit of formal methods in philosophy.", "He opens with Michael Potter's Wittgenstein material and Russell's line that Wittgenstein 'doesn't want to prove this or that, but to find out how things really are,' which sets up a Wittgensteinian attitude toward logic.", "The central question is what makes a semantics adequate for a logic, why there can be multiple semantic systems for the same logic, and what it means to ask what logic is a model of.", "He then uses the 'squeezing argument' around validity, the standard pair of deductive and semantic systems, and the late-nineteenth-century history of axiomatising mathematics to argue that semantic adequacy is the real fitting problem."]
A philosopher critiques possible worlds semantics and proposes a theory of branching continuations for historical possibilities.
A talk on Carnap's extremal axioms and categoricity, exploring presyntax invariance in mathematical philosophy.
A lecture on Carnap's evolving views on theoretical terms and their connection to ontology, using Ramsey sentences and Hilbert's epsilon operator.
A philosopher discusses his long-standing collaboration with statisticians on applying mathematical methods to philosophical problems.
A talk on solving a paradox in hypothetical reasoning by treating conditionals with truth conditions and the Ramsey test.
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy examines coherence-based probability logic and its use in experimental philosophy of uncertain reasoning.
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy presents a group session at LMU Munich featuring Roland Kalinga, Florian Staschberger, Thomas Mayer, Jensu Kupi, Olivier Rois, and additional presentations on causal models, logic, structural realism, and confirmation.
The LMU Munich talk examines Bayesian explication of epistemological notions including confirmation, explanatory power, coherence, and the value of information search options.
MCMP – Mathematical Philosophy examines how self-referential sentences relate to the liar sentence, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, provability, truth, necessity, analyticity, and knowability.