史德凡 Shawn Standefer

Adding new logic concepts to formalize important philosophical ideas

As an undergrad, my interests were split between philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. I was excited to find out that logic crosses the boundaries between these areas. Logic is, broadly, about entailment and conceptual connections, and logical tools can be used to study meaning, information, mathematical structures, programming languages, and rationality, among other things. My interests have stayed focused on logic since I learned about it as an undergraduate.

After finishing my PhD, I went to Australia for a postdoc at the University of Melbourne. While at Melbourne, I organized the Melbourne Logic Group, a group of logicians from different disciplines and departments around the Melbourne area. From that exposure, my interests shifted to non-classical logics, in particular to relevant logics, which reject many assumptions of two-valued, classical logic. My research continues to focus on relevant logic. I have just completed a manuscript on the topic that brings together some classic results together with my more recent work in the area in a way that will, I hope, be compelling to readers from a variety of backgrounds.

The interdisciplinary attitude towards logic has carried over to my teaching. At the University of Melbourne, I revamped the intermediate logic course with my colleague Greg Restall. For that, we wrote a book, Logical Methods, that we could use for the course, taking a distinctive pedagogical approach that reflected our generally pluralistic views about logic. We completed the book after I got to NTU, and it was published in early 2023 with MIT Press.

At National Taiwan University, I continue to teach and research logic, approaching it from different angles. The basic idea I picked up as an undergrad still seems right, that logic thrives when it takes an interdisciplinary perspective.