Hello! I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and I like thinking about – and helping other people think about – logic and philosophy and the many different ways they can inform each other. I am known for work on substructural logics, logical pluralism, and, more recently, connections between proof theory and philosophy. I use this site to post news items and the occasional thought, and to serve as a repository of my writing, presentations and teaching.


News

A few months ago, Anna Day, Eloise Hickey, Mark Rothery, and James Cafferky from the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia gave me an opportunity to ramble on about my early days as a mathematics and philosophy student in the 1980s and 1990s, my current research interests, and what I’m thinking about now. They asked thoughtful questions and managed to edit the interview into something coherent.

Check it out, if only for the photos of me in my teens and twenties, then stay for the philosophy.


A Brush with Fame

26 January 2023

In my PY1012 Reasoning lecture this evening, I used a slide with a photo of Sally Haslanger and a short section from her book Resisting Reality to give an example of an argument to a universal generalisation. (I’ve been teaching reasoning using examples from throughout the philosophical canon.)

After class a young student came up to me, all excited, asking: do you know Professor Haslanger!? (I had described her as a colleague.) I explained that yes, we’d met and I’d known her for some time. She reacted as if I had been in the presence of a rock star, and that she was now a little bit closer to true greatness as a result. When I said I loved Sally’s work, and then added that Kate Manne had been a student of mine at the University of Melbourne before she went to MIT to study with Sally, the student was absolutely beside herself.

It’s a delight to exploit my own personal contacts with colleagues and friends, to help a student feel a little closer to what she truly treasures in the sometimes humdrum matter of teaching intro reasoning.


I grew up in Australia: my university training and my initial academic positions took place in the explicitly secular institution of the Australian university. So, it’s an uncanny experience to arrive in St Andrews to become a part of a university in a town marked by martyrdom, in which the Chaplaincy plays a central and visible role. University functions, including graduations, are opened with prayers in Latin. There are regular services in Chapel, including graduation services, and many involve an procession of academics, in robes. The separation of “church” and “state” is nowhere near as sharp here in St Andrews as it was in Australia. The university is explicitly pluralist, and the chaplains work very hard to make space for students of all faiths and none. And at the same time, this place owns its Christian heritage.

So, it was to my surprise – and my trepidation – that I was invited to preach the sermon at the Sunday chapel service at the start of this new semester. I seem to have survived the experience of doing something in my work context that is far outside the everyday responsibility of my academic role as a Professor of Philosophy.


Erdős Number: 3

7 January 2023

According to the AMS’s handy Mathematics Collaboration Distance calculator, my Erdős number is down to three, given the following path:

This makes my Erdős number equal to my Trotsky number, but that is another story.


As my colleague and PY1012 Reasoning co-lecturer, Franz Berto knows, it’s never too early to introduce your students to wombats, or to the difference between a conditional and an inference.

A picture of a wombat, superimposed with the text 'Quiz: Conditional or Inference? - The wombat is tired, so she will be irritable if provoked,' with the first phrase 'The wombat is tired' encircled and annotated as the premise, the 'so', recording the inference, and 'she will be irritable if provoked' as the conclusion. These annotations are all in yellow. Then, in green, the conclusion is separately annotated, with 'she will be irritable' marked as the consequent, the 'if' marked as indicating that this is a conditional, and 'provoked' marked as the antecedent. Finally, this antecedent is spelled out, in blue, as 'She is provoked'.
A slide from my first week’s PY1012 lecture.

Yes, next semester’s classes are just about to start, and I’m in the depths of preparation.


Today MIT Press releases our book, Logical Methods into the big wide world. It was an absolute delight to work on this long-term project with my co-author and friend, Shawn Standefer.

A Stack of Copies of the book Logical Methods, written by Greg Restall and Shawn Standefer, MIT Press, 2023
A Stack of Copies of Logical Methods

Read More…


2022 has been another big year, not that you’d know it from looking around the news section of this website. Settling in to St Andrews has taken up a lot of my energy (in a good way), and I’ve been having too much fun writing things and giving talks to spend time updating this website.

With the break between Christmas and New Year, I finally had time to clean up a bit of the mess around here, and update things.

Read More…

Recent Writing

Proofs with Star and Perp (to appear in New Directions in Relevant Logics) Abstract PDF
Reflections on Brady's Logic of Meaning Containment (article in progress) Abstract PDF
Greg Restall and Shawn Standefer, “Collection Frames for Distributive Substructural Logics,” Review of Symbolic Logic, (2023) 16:4, 1120-1157. Abstract PDF
The Philosophical Significance of the Paradoxes (to appear in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Logic) Abstract PDF
Looking at Logic(s), Chapter 4 in What are They Thinking? Conversations with Australian Philosophers, edited by Daniel Nellor, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2023. Abstract PDF
Review of Jc Beall, The Contradictory Christ, Religious Studies, 59, (2023), 556–559. Abstract PDF
Structural Rules in Natural Deduction with Alternatives, Bulletin of the Section of Logic, pp. 35 (2023), Early View. Abstract PDF

Recent Presentations

Finitude, Eternity, Love, the Good and Martin Hagglünd’s ‘This Life’, The Logos Institute for Analytical and Exegetical Theology, University of St Andrews; 3 November 2023.
The Semantics and Psychology of Negation: The Australian Plan, Negation as Failure, and Card Selection Tasks, University of Stirling Philosophy Seminar; 19 October 2023.
The Semantics and Psychology of Negation: The Australian Plan, Negation as Failure, and Card Selection Tasks, Arché Metaphysics and Logic Seminar; 20 September 2023.
The Semantics and Psychology of Negation: The Australian Plan, Negation as Failure, and Card Selection Tasks, 15th Conference of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy; 8 September 2023.
Finitude, Eternity, Love, the Good and Martin Hagglünd’s ‘This Life’, The British Society for the Philosophy of Religion 2023 Conference; 1 September 2023.
Exploring Three-Valued Models for Identity, Logic in Bochum; 20 July 2023.
Numbers, the World, and God: Varieties of Semantic Anti-Realism, European Academy of Religion 2023 Conference, Symposium on Negative Theology and Philosophical Analysis; 22 June 2023.

Recent Classes

PY4612: Advanced Logic, the University of St Andrews; January 2024. NOW ON
PY2010: Intermediate Logic, the University of St Andrews; September 2023.
PY4601: Paradoxes, the University of St Andrews; January 2023.
PY1012: Reasoning, the University of St Andrews; January 2023.
PY3100: Reading Philosophy 1—Texts in Language, Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Metaphysics and Science, the University of St Andrews; September 2022.
PY4638: Philosophy of Religion, the University of St Andrews; September 2022.
PY1012: Reasoning, the University of St Andrews; January 2022.

about

I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. I am the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology I like thinking about – and helping other people think about – logic and philosophy and the many different ways they can inform each other.

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