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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
A Manual of Intensional Logic: 2nd Edition (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)
I wonder if David Foster Wallace read this when it came out in 1988, three years after he wrote his paper on the logical philosophy of fatalism? Unfortunately, I seem to recall that van Bentham disposes of the whole "sea battle" argument in about a page and half - with modern tools available, he argues, pretty convincingly, that it's no more than a confusion between predicate logic and modal logic. But I haven't finished reading Wallace's thesis yet, so maybe I'm being too harsh on him. I can see he's using Kripke structures, so perhaps he just reaches the same conclusion in a more long-winded way. I will post an update when I've finished.Also, to be fair, Wallace was writing an undergraduate thesis, while this is now the standard reference, written by the world's acknowledged leading expert on the subject.
