Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy: Update

About a year ago I posted an announcement of the launch of a new, open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the history of analytic philosophy. I am pleased to report that 2 articles and 1 substantial book review have already appeared:
James Pearson, Distinguishing WV Quine and Donald Davidson
Francesco Orsi, David Ross, Ideal Utilitarianism, and the Intrinsic Value of Acts
Kevin Klement, Review: Gregory Landini, Russell. London and New York, Routledge 2011.
Interested readers are encouraged to subscribe to the journal's Facebook page for news and updates on new articles. Our goal is to publish articles as soon as possible after they have been through our review process.
Update (Feb. 19): The journal also has an RSS feed that will list recent articles.

Mathematics and Scientific Representation now available for Google preview

Despite not actually being in print, my forthcoming book can now be previewed on Google books here.

Mathematics and Scientific Representation book cover

My book Mathematics and Scientific Representation will soon be released. Here is the recently unveiled book cover:

More substantial discussions of the book's contents will be added here soon!

Classic Mr. Show: 24 is the highest number

Some inspiration to start the semester:

The unplanned impact of mathematics (Nature)

Peter Rowlett has assembled, with some other historians of mathematics, seven accessible examples of how theoretical work in mathematics led to unexpected practical applications. His discussion seems to be primarily motivated by the recent emphasis on the "impact" of research, both in Britain and in the US:

There is no way to guarantee in advance what pure mathematics will later find application. We can only let the process of curiosity and abstraction take place, let mathematicians obsessively take results to their logical extremes, leaving relevance far behind, and wait to see which topics turn out to be extremely useful. If not, when the challenges of the future arrive, we won't have the right piece of seemingly pointless mathematics to hand.

For philosophers, the most important example to keep in mind, I think, is the last one, offered by Chris Linton: the role of Fourier series in promoting the later "rigorization" of math:

In the 1870s, Georg Cantor's first steps towards an abstract theory of sets came about through analysing how two functions with the same Fourier series could differ.

Rowlett has a call for more examples on the BSHM website. Hopefully this will convince some funding agencies that immediate impact is not a fair standard!

Revised SEP Entry: Mathematical Explanation

The Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on "Mathematical Explanation" has just been updated and revised. Thanks to Paolo Mancosu for this important resource!

Babies are Bayesians?

From the abstract of a recent paper in Science:

When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants’ looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants’ statistical expectations and classic qualitative findings about object cognition in younger babies, not originally viewed as probabilistic inferences.