Logic & Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine

November 2007: Carla Valenzuela awarded 2007-08 Stephen K. Tamura fellowship. Awarded annually through the Alumni Association, the rotating university fellowship recognizes Valenzuela's excellence in academia. Complete news item here: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news_item.php?nid=1628

October 2007: Penelope Maddy awarded the title of UCI Distinguished Professor. The UCI Distinguished Professor title is the highest campus distinction for academic achievement on the Irvine campus. Professor Maddy is an internationally recognized leader in the field of logic and the philosophy of mathematics, where her research has redefined the philosophical basis of mathematics. Congratulations Pen! Detailed information available here.

September 2007: View pictures from the Fall Convocation.

June 2007: LPS graduate student Carla Valenzuela awarded the Kathy Alberti Award for Graduate Student Excellence. The award was presented during the School of Social Sciences Order of Merit Ceremony held June 15, 2007.

May 2007: Penelope Maddy's new book Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic Method has been released by Oxford University Press. Maddy introduces a particularly austere naturalistic inquirer, the Second Philosopher, by tracing her relations to various naturalists and reactions to various anti-naturalists, and by illustrating how one contemporary debate (in the theory of truth) can be reconfigured in properly second-philosophical form. She then applies the Second Philosopher's methods to questions in the foundations of logic and mathematics, and in the philosophy of science and metaphysics more generally. Further information is available here.

May 2007: LPS graduate student Rory Smead has been awarded the 2007 Goldberg Prize for the "Best Graduate Student Paper" by the North American Computing and Philosophy Conference Committee.

March 2007: LPS graduate student Kevin Zollman has been awarded the Herbert Simon Post Doctoral Fellowship in Scientific Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University.

March 2007: LPS graduate student Rory Smead has been awarded the 2007 Justine Lambert Prize for his paper "The Evolution of Cooperation in the Centipede Game with Finite Population".

February 2007: Penelope Maddy has been elected President of the Association of Symbolic Logic for a 3-year term ending Jan 1, 2010.

November 2006: According to the 2006-2008 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, UCI Philosophy (LPS + the Department of Philosophy) ranks first among all philosophy programs in the aggregated field of "philosophy of the sciences and mathematics".

The Report gave UCI Philosophy the following individual field rankings:

1st for philosophy of mathematics
2nd for decision, rational choice and game theory
2nd(tied) for philosophy of physics
philosophy of social science
philosophy of science (general)
4th (tied) for mathematical logic
5th (tied) for philosophical logic
8th (tied) metaphysics
10th (tied) medieval philosophy
12th (tied) early modern 17th century
13th (tied) ancient philosophy
14th (tied) early modern 18th century
17th (tied) philosophy of biology
17th(tied) epistemology
18th (tied) history of analytic philosophy

Overall, UCI Philosophy was ranked 20th among philosophy programs in the US, tied with University of Chicago and UC San Diego.

October 2006: Penelope Maddy presented the 2006 Gauss Lecture in Dresden (organized by the German counterpart to the American Mathematical Society). This is the first time ever a philosopher has been invited to give the lecture. Further information is available here.

September 2006: View pictures from the Fall Convocation.

May 2006: LPS graduate student John Manchak has been awarded the "Rob Clifton Memorial Book Prize" for his paper "Observational Indistinguishability and Geodesic Incompleteness". The Prize is awarded annually by the Philosophy Department at the University of Western Ontario for the best paper in philosophy of physics submitted by a graduate student. It honors the memory of Rob Clifton, who was both a graduate student and faculty member at UWO.

May, 2006: Brian Skyrms presented the 2006 Reichenbach Lecture at UCLA.

March 2006: Kyle Stanford's new book Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives has been released by Oxford University Press.

He argues (1) that the history of scientific inquiry reveals our persistent failure to even conceive of the scientific theories that would be accepted by later scientific communities and (2) that this pattern should lead us to resist the view that even the most successful theories of the present day offer even broadly accurate descriptions of how things stand in otherwise inaccessible domains of nature. Further information is available here.

June, 2005: LPS graduate student Kevin Zollman has been awarded the 2005 Justine Lambert Prize for his paper "Talking to Neighbors: The Evolution of Regional Meaning."

June 2005: Aldo Antonelli's new book Grounded Consequence for Defeasible Logic has been released by Cambridge University Press.

It deals with the foundations of defeasible logic, which explores the formal properties of everyday reasoning patterns whereby people jump to conclusions, reserving the right to retract them in the light of further information. The main approach develops a formal theory inspired by Kripke's groundbreaking work on the theory of truth, thereby obtaining a mathematically well-behaved notion defeasible consequence. Beside this technical development, the book also contains sections that outline basic issues by means of intuitive and simple examples. This book is primarily targeted at philosophers interested in the foundations of defeasible logic, logicians, and specialists in artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science. More information is available here.

December 2003: Brian Skyrms' new book The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure has been released by Cambridge University Press.

The book takes Rousseau's "Stag Hunt" game as a paradigm of the problem of the social contract -- how to get from the non-cooperative "safe" equilibrium to the cooperative, mutually beneficial one. Three factors that generate correlation -- (1) interaction with neighbors, (2) exchange of signals, (3) dynamic social networks -- are shown to powerfully promote mutual benefit. More information is available here.

January, 2003: Brian Skyrms has been elected President of the Philosophy of Science Association.

November, 2002: Penelope Maddy has been awarded the 2002 Lakatos Prize for her book Naturalism in Mathematics. She will give the Lakatos Award Lecture, "Second Philosophy" in May, 2003.

March, 2002: Penelope Maddy has been awarded the 2002 UC Irvine Distinguished Lectureship for Research.

February, 2002: LPS hosted Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow Persi Diaconis, the Mary Sunseri Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University. He presented a lecture entitled "Coincidence".

February 2002: LPS awarded the 2002 Justine Lambert Prize to Christopher Dopher, a graduate student in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, for his paper "On Invariance Properties of Empirical Laws".

October, 2001: UC Irvine hosted the 2001 Southern California Philosophy Conference.

June 2001: UC Irvine celebrated the 25th Anniversary of the Salzburg Exchange Program. See pictures here.

March, 2001: Brian Skyrms has been awarded the 2001 UC Irvine Distinguished Lectureship for Research.

February 2001: Penelope Maddy has been elected Vice President of the Association for Symbolic Logic for a three year term ending Jan 1, 2004.

October, 2000: LPS co-sponsored a talk by James Randi at UCI.

April, 2000: Logic and Philosophy of Science officially became a department in the School of Social Sciences at UCI.

March, 2000: Brian Skyrms has been awarded the 1999 Lakatos Prize for his book Evolution of the Social Contract. He will present the Lakatos Award Lecture in May, 2003.

October, 1999: UC Irvine hosted the 1999 Southern California Philosophy Conference.

October,1999: LPS hosted Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow Solomon Feferman.

April 1999: Brian Skyrms has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

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