Logic

Carnap, Maturana, Bloom and Agrippa: four attempts to police a line

Rudolf Carnap died on 14 September 1970; Humberto Maturana was born on this day in 1928, Allan Bloom in 1930 and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1486. Three of them spent their lives fixing a boundary — of the meaningful, the cognising, the educated. The fourth refused to stand on either side of his.

Martha Nussbaum, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Humberto Maturana, Allan Bloom

Autumn's philosophy list is arguing about mind, truth and the authority of reason

Eight books published or due between now and the end of December, none of them covered in this week's two surveys. Read together, they show a discipline that has stopped asking whether machines can think and started asking what thinking is worth — and a logic revival almost nobody has noticed.

Byung-Chul Han, Giorgio Agamben, David Chalmers

Vienna's October cluster, and a conference diary that admits its gaps

Four meetings in sixteen days at the University of Vienna, including a congress on how the story of the Vienna Circle has been told. Plus the UCLA date muddle settled from the department's own page, three further meetings that survived checking, and five that did not.

Leibniz beyond the cartoon: the man who wanted to calculate thought

Three centuries after his death in Hanover, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz survives in undergraduate memory as the man with the monads and the man Voltaire mocked. Both caricatures obscure the project that actually drove him: the conviction that reasoning could be made into a calculation, and the reasons he thought machines could never finish the job.

Timothy Williamson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the case against the two-sentence summary

Everyone carries a potted Wittgenstein: first he drew the limits of language, then he decided meaning is use. Specialists have largely stopped believing that story. What survives is stranger and more useful - a single long experiment in what philosophy is for.

Anthony Kenny, Ludwig Wittgenstein

Robert Alexy dies: the man who gave law back its claim to correctness

Robert Alexy, among the most influential legal philosophers of the past half-century, died on Saturday 5 September at the age of 80, four days short of his 81st birthday. He leaves a method behind him — proportionality. What he really leaves is a question. Is everything a state does law?

The 2026 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics goes to a return to logical atomism

The Sanders Prize in Metaphysics, awarded every other year, has gone for 2026 to a joint paper by two young researchers at Berkeley: 'Logical Atomism'. The winning essay puts back on the table a programme Russell and Wittgenstein founded a century ago.

The congress that meets every four years goes to Kobe: the CLMPST 2027 call is open

The world congress of logic, methodology and philosophy of science has met every four years since 1960. The eighteenth is at Kobe University in August 2027. The call for papers is open — and the single word added to the congress's name tells you how the field has changed in a quarter of a century.

The Rescher Prize goes to Kit Fine: why has metaphysics come back?

The American Philosophical Association has chosen Kit Fine to deliver the 2027 Nicholas Rescher Prize Lecture. The decision points not to one man but to the fortunes of a field: metaphysics, declared meaningless for much of the twentieth century, is back at the centre of analytic philosophy.