I’m very excited to say that I’ll be heading to Concordia University at the end of May to give a talk to the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics.  The meeting is a part of the Annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a week-long affair wherein all of Canada’s academic societies in the Humanities and Social Sciences get together to for a giant conference.  I love Montreal, and it will be all the better with the huge number of academics descending on the city for that week.

I believe my presentation is scheduled for Saturday, May 29th at 10:30. My paper is entitled Ramsey’s Little Argument, abstract below:

In the “Foundations of Mathematics” (1925), Frank Ramsey briefly sketches what amounts to a model-theoretic proof that the axiom of reducibility is not a logical truth. I trace the history of this proof—from Ramsey, through the work of Wittgenstein, Russell, Waismann, Black, and eventually Quinton—and suggest that it offers insight into Ramsey’s reinterpretation of the Principia Mathematica. More generally I argue that the proof can be seen to occupy a peculiar place between a universalist and more modern model-theoretic understanding of logical languages. This is especially interesting in light of recent work by Awodey, Carus, and Goldfarb on Carnap’s intellectual development during the late 1920s.

Should be fun!