New APPS

This morning, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock posted on Philos-L the sad news of Laurence Goldstein’s passing, after a short illness. I suspect that this comes very much as a surprise to most of us in the philosophy community, as Laurence seemed to be active and thriving; among other things, his edited collection Brevity came out just last year.

This website at the department of philosophy at Kent, where Laurence had been for the past decade or so (after many years in Hong-Kong), has a very nice summary of his work and research interests. He was mostly interested in philosophy of logic, and more specifically in paradoxes. I’ve corresponded quite extensively with Laurence on the topic of medieval solutions to the Liar paradox, a topic which he had grown particularly fond of (e.g. his paper in this volume). But Laurence also had a keen interest in the teaching of logic, and in particular developed a number of devices to make logical properties more perspicuous, as it were. In my opinion, one of his most original achievements was the development of a method to teach logic to blind students, based on a device he developed for this purpose, the Sylloid.

I last saw Laurence last year in Rio for UNILOG, where he was teaching a tutorial on ‘Logic for the blind’. This initially practical concern had led him to reflect deeply on some of the ‘material aspects’ of logic, a field thought by many to be quintessentially abstract. (Here our paths had met again, as I have also worked quite extensively on the ‘materiality’ of external devices for logical reasoning, in particular formal languages.) He seemed energetic and healthy, and so it is a bit of a shock to hear of his passing. But his work will stay with us, as well as the memories of friends and colleagues who interacted with him more closely. Please feel free to share your memories of Laurence in comments below. 

(This reminds me that we did not post anything to mark the passing of David Armstrong here at NewAPPS. Perhaps we should still have a belated in memoriam for him too.)