Darko R.K. Sarenac

Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1781
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Phone: (970) 491-5441
Fax: (970) 491-4900
Email: Darko dot Sarenac at colostate dot edu

DEPARTMENT OF PHLOSOPHY at CSU

Assistant Professor

Ph.D. Stanford University, 2006
M.A. Simon Fraser University, 2000
B.A. Honours, Simon Fraser University, 1998

Upcoming Conferences of Interest in Philosophy and Logic:

Spring of 2010, Amsterdam, NL · The Amsterdam Meeting on Logic, Dynamics, and Space · Organizers J.F.A.K. van Benthem and D.K. Sarenac. Check back here shortly for a list of speakers and topics. In the meantime check for the news in the world of Modal Logic at ILLC http://www.illc.uva.nl/

Logic Saturday, Colorado's Front Range Logic Seminar

A Logic child of Bart Kastermans at CU Boulder, and Natasha Dobrinen at University of Denver. The idea is to meet twice a semester, alternating between Boulder and Denver. We are in the talks to add CSU in the mix and to alternate among Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins. Anyone else in the Front Range interested in joining logical forces? Let us know. Website at: Colorado Logic Saturday

Society for Exact Philosophy Annual Meeting

19-21 March 2010 in Kansas City, Missouri · The annual meeting of the Society for the Exact Philosophy. Still one of the most eclectic logic and philosophy conferences on this continent. It alternates biannually between Canada and the U.S.
For those of us regulars, it is an annual pilgrim. Check http://web.phil.ufl.edu/SEP/ for more details.

AiML: Advances in Modal Logic

AiML 2010 is to take place in Moscow, Russia · Advances in Modal Logic is a premier biannual conference in Modal Logic. Given the technical dominance of Russians in recent years, Moscow seems a fitting place. For more info and dates, see http://www.aiml.net/.

Blog that lists Upcoming Conferences, Summer Schools, and other Events in Philosophy

This is a great website that lists a fine variety of conferences in a number of subdisciplines of philosophy. It does not focus on logic, cognitive science, or formal modeling, but one can find an occasional jewel. A decent selection on Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Aesthetics. I find the global coverage refreshing. Check it out at:
Philosophy CFPs

For Balance, a List of Technical Logic Conferences in CS. Brought to you by LICS, Logic in Computer Science.

A decent list of technical computer science conferences in logic and on closely related formal methods. Check it out at:
Logic Conferences (LICS)

Public Concern, Acting in the Real World, et al.

Women in philosophy

Here are two recent articles on the dismal numbers of women in philosophy. The first one is a NYT commentary: New York Times on this TPM article. Only around 1 in 5 professional philosophers are women! If you are interested in studying the issue by thinking hard, examining the data, creating formal models, perhaps in the Agent Based Modeling paradigm, let us know. Some of us in CoCoLoDES Group are really interested in trying to understand the issues of under representation of women and pretty much all minorities in our discipline. It would be nice to collect data and get to the core of the issue. And then, well... ACT! (Of course if you are just interested in arguing meanly and aggressively about the issue, we'll understand that too. Or ... maybe not.)

Genocide, racial bigotry, national and religious hatred. This is the current which quite frankly is behind my being in the academe to begin with. On a gray day, my academic position is a hiding locale; from the strong social currents of intolerance I run into the virtual world of other worldly, but formally accessible, mathematical structures. On a sunny, bright optimistic day, my goal is to understand the dynamics of such currents, their control variables, phase transitions, and subtle features that escape linear and biased analysis. I think we are finally starting to develop the set of tools to understand such complex dynamical systems as social systems capable of hatred and bigotry. I hope to live to see the day when we attained the tools for understanding such complex social intricacies, and yes, why not, a day when we eradicated them. A fairy tale? Maybe, but I have to believe it. If you are interested in studying this from a perspective of a logician, a dynamic modeler, and a philosopher, let's join forces!

Travel, Talks, Whereabouts:

August 2010 to August 2011 will be mostly spent as a Visiting Professor between L'université de Paris 1 Panthéon - La Sorbonne and Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, in Paris, FR. · I will be taking a mini sabbatical at CSU where I will be teaching during one semester only, most likely the Spring. Much of the rest of the year will be spent doing research between Paris and Fort Collins and participating in various events throughout Europe. In Paris, I will be working mainly with Gabriel Sandu and other logicians connected to IHPST. Activities at IHPST

March 2009, Spatial Relations: An Interdisciplinary Perspective · A Lovely `By Invitation Only' workshop on thinking and tinkering with space and spatial relationships. A truly interdisciplinary gathering of cognitive scientists wonderfully set-up by Annie Zaenen and Alistair Isaac. It enabled the participants to converse, interact, and think aloud about the issue of spatial reasoning, language of spatial relations, dynamics of our visual interaction with the environment. Check Spatial Reasoning Workshop for more details.

October 2009, Philosophy Colloquium and a Guest Lecture at the Humanities Center at California State at Chico · I am giving a more general version of my talk on fractal properties and their usefulness for `computing' spatial properties of our visual or spatial surroundings. My goal is to engage a general audience into trying to see what it would take to have a mathematical theory of our spatial reasoning abilities. My hope is to convince them that the fractal geometry when conceived appropriately provides a nice substitute for Euclidean thinking about how we visually interact with our spatial surroundings. I feel very much privileged to be invited to speak at CSU, Chico. Chico is our Sister organization in its heritage, organizational structure, and its position in a mainly agrarian and beautiful setting. Even the acronym, CSU Chico, shares `CSU' with us. So go Wildcats!

September 2009, Cog Sci and Mathematics Colloquia at the University of Pennsylvania I spent a lovely weekend at Penn and gave a pair of talks, one for the general Cog Sci audience at The Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Noon Colloquium (Slides), and one slightly more technical talk at Math Departments's Logic and Computation Seminar (Slides). Michael Weisberg, my very kind host, arranged for me to meet Peter Freyd, Scott Weinstein (possibly the nicest guy in the universe), and Andre Scedrov among logicians, and an awesomely deep and formally informed linguist, Mark Lieberman (of Language Log fame), a philosopher at Wharton Business School ?!?, Steven O. Kimbrough but a really nice and approachable person and a deep thinker, and finally Robin Clark, a linguist with a wonderfully broad interests and a deep knowledge of philosophy.

Future Talks, Conferences, Papers from Fall of 2009, to `10, 11, and on I am currently working on giving some of the work that I have been doing with a group of collaborators that include Tamar Lando, Michael Weisberg, Patrick Forber, my students Mike Eland, Ben Harrison, John Dunn, Josh Shepherd and others, a roof above their heads, and some basic structure. We are working on founding a lab that can house and fund the kind of research described here. The lab will be called THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLABORATION, COOPERATION AND LOGIC IN DYNAMIC EPISTEMIC SYSTEMS GROUP at CSU. Or CoCoLoDES for short. Our goal is organize colloquium series around computational modeling of various epistemic and logical aspects of science and other forms of acquisitions of knowledge. Please check our website for more information about our research activities. If you are interested in coming by giving a talk and sharing some of your research, please email us. Conversely, if you are interested in seeing some of our work, would like to collaborate, or to invite some of us to speak formally or informally, let us know. Our goal is to found a multi disciplinary, multi institutional, and multinational group for research of dynamics of communication and collaboration, epistemic and otherwise.

Master and Doctoral Disertations

Logic(s) of Time, Space, and Change

My thesis titled "The Topological Modal Logics" was on the modal logics of space. I was supervised by J. F. A. K. van Benthem (Amsterdam), and committee included Solomon Feferman (Stanford), Grisha Mints (Stanford and sometime St. Petersburg), and Guram Bezhanishvili (NMSU). I was a second reader for a volume that introduces the field of spatial logic to the broader audience entitled Handbook of Spatial Logics edited by Marco Aiello, Ian Pratt-Hartmann, Johan van Benthem. More detail can be gathered from the publisher's website: Springer Handbook

Preservation of Logical Properties and Paraconistency

My Master Thesis work has resulted in a rich research project on paraconsistent logic that aims not only to explore possible usefulness of paraconsistent logic in science and other fields of human inquiry, but also to understand logical intricacies of implication on a level deeper than classical logic can provide. My thesis entitled "A preservationist Approach to Implication" has resulted in several publication and some invaluable collaborations. Ray Jennings supervised the project and Bryson Brown (Lethbridge) and Andrew Irvine (UBC) completed the Committee.

Summary of interests: Darko's interests include mathematical logic, philosophical logic, cognitive science and A.I.,and formal epistemology. He has published in Studia Logica, Archives for Mathematical Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic, The Logic Journal of IGPL, and contributed chapters to books including Paraconsistency, The Logical Way to the Inconsistent, Truth and Probability, Trends in universal logic, and Logical Consequence: Rival Approaches and New Studies in Exact Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Science. He is currently interested in the ways in which logic contributes to the dynamics of communication in natural language.