Jason Chen

I wonder if that's a function of philosophy or just force of habit. E.g., couple of months ago Hong Wang (NYU Math, presumably native Chinese speaker) presented her breakthrough with the Kakeya conj. in Beijing and asked if she can switch to English mid-seminar, bc it's easier to talk math that way

What does plural quantification not in Japanese mean? That they don't have grammatical marking for plurals?

Recently I've had the pleasure of being interviewed on the blog of the American Philosophical Association. You can read the whole thing here: blog.apaonline.org/2025/09/12/a...

You don't have to read the whole thing of course, but please enjoy the two snippets that I'm pretty proud of ;)

Like, surjeggtion?

Peer Review, Intellectual Tastes, and Some Fun - Daily Nous Have you ever wanted to tell off the reviewers of your manuscript? One philosopher imagined doing that, wrote it up, and got it published in a peer-reviewed journal. To the referees, he says: I ask yo...

Ever dream of telling off your reviewers? One philosopher wrote up his version of doing so, and got it published...

Varzi's "Beth Too But Only If", published on Analysis, is written in the form of 5 (or something) students each presenting their own differing interpretation of a single sentence.

I think this is quite interesting.

Still not really sure what to make of the imo surprising results.

Huge thanks to Gabe Goldberg and Pen Maddy for quite different forms of generous assistance.

“Pity the Poor Reader” - Daily Nous "Pity the poor reader" is one of philosopher Penelope Maddy's writing maxims. Maddy is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, and is interviewed about her writing by...

"In philosophy especially, I figure the reader is nearly always gasping for breath, in danger of being swept out to sea, so the writer should do everything in their power to help..." Penelope Maddy is interviewed by Nathan Ballantyne - @nathanballantyne.bsky.social - at The Workbench

Jason Chen, Toby Meadows
Teasing apart definitional equivalence
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03956

Cesare Straffelini, Sebastiano Thei
Higher Solovay Models
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19129

Vladimir Kanovei, Vassily Lyubetsky
Notes on the equiconsistency of ZFC without the Power Set axiom and 2nd order PA
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11643

Yale Philosophy offers a course on “Formal Philosophical Methods” — a broad introduction to probability, logic, formal semantics, etc.

Instructor Calum McNamara has now made all materials for the course (78 pages) freely available

static1.squarespace.com/static/6255f...

It should be June 2025 instead of June 2023 (as it currently states in the blog opening), right?

Maybe it's a nice baby logic exercise to observe how the negation of "you can make it anywhere" is *not* "you can't make it anywhere" - one of those cautionary tales of the mismatch between the logical form and the natural language (surface) syntax ;)

I built a little Shiny app that shows how often various words were used in 20 prominent philosophy journals from 1980-2019.

bweatherson.shinyapps.io/t20-graphs/

James Cummings, Yair Hayut, Menachem Magidor, Itay Neeman, Dima Sinapova, Spencer Unger
The tree property on long intervals of regular cardinals
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08118

My publisher wants alt text for my tikz figures, which is a good idea. They asked for a Word file, absurd, but here is my latex solution. I wrote \alttext macro. Place \alttext{alt text} at end of every tikz picture. Resulting pdf shows alt text with mouseover on figure.

That's amazing. Great win for the set theory community!

that's a lot of ground to cover! (Yes pun intended...) These lectures will be for how many days?

ZML - Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik ZML: Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik is an electronic Diamond Open Access research journal in mathematical logic publishing original research papers in all areas of m...

I'm excited to join the editorial board of a new diamond open access journal in mathematical logic:

ZML: Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik
zml.international

The open letter of the editors of ZML can be found online on the webpage.

The true Kuhnian paradigm-shifts all and only those who don't paradigm-shift their own paradigm.

Your favorite theorem? ;)

A great pleasure to be nominated on the APA Committee on Non-Academic Careers. Looking forward to contributing back to the broader philosophical community in the next three years!

YouTube video by DorFuchs Die Ableitung vom Sinus ist der Kosinus (Mathe-Song)

I don't speak German, and neither do my calculus students, but even so I think this is one of the best explanations of the derivative of sine and cosine I've ever seen.

Also, it's a bop that won't get out of my head.
#mathsky #iTeachMath

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSov...

oh right, because N contains M to begin with... Thanks!

I remember Groszek has a way to force (from a model M of ZFC+CH) a minimal failure of CH, in the sense that any model N s.t. M⊆N⊆M[G] is a model of CH but M[G] is not. An uncountable such M[G] will witness the failure of the countable transitive submodel proposition, right?

Ah, I see, so the thought is that Löwenheim-Skolem gives you well-founded submodel, and Mostowski collapse gives you the transitive isomorph, but the Mostowski collapse might not be a submodel of the original model (only that it embeds in it via the anti-collapse map).

What is "the countable transitive submodel proposition"? Is it just the claim that every transitive model of (say) ZFC has a countable transitive (proper) submodel?

I made an awesome pun in Chinese about the Fubini property today. Too bad it won't translate...

Really reassuring that there's still a place where people enjoy talking about ideals, especially in today's society