Anubav Vasudevan

Anubav Vasudevan
Associate Professor
Rosenwald Hall, Room 218-C
Office Hours: On leave Winter and Spring 2024
773.702.4234
Columbia University PhD (2012); Virginia Polytechinic Institute and State University, BS Physics and Philosophy (2002)
Teaching at UChicago since 2011; on leave 2018-19
Research Interests: Metaphysics & Epistemology

Anubav Vasudevan is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. His current research interests are in the areas of formal epistemology and the history of logic. His work in the former area relates primarily to issues in the foundations of probability, in particular, the question of how it might be possible to reconcile an objective interpretation of probability with a metaphysical conception of the world as subject to strictly deterministic laws. His research in the history of logic focuses on the logical writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. His work on this topic aims both to illuminate the fundamental relationship that exists between Leibniz’s system of logic and his more well-known metaphysical and epistemological doctrines, and to situate Leibniz’s logic within the broader history of the subject, dating back to Aristotle’s theory of the categorical syllogism and continuing through to the systems of algebraic logic developed in the work of such nineteenth-century logicians as Boole, Peirce, and Schröder. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2012. He is the chair of the department's Diversity, Inclusivity, Climate, and Equity Committee in 2021-22.

Selected Publications

Vasudevan, A. Biased Information and the Exchange Paradox. Synthese (forthcoming)

Vasudevan, A. Entropy and Insufficient Reason: A Note on the Judy Benjamin Problem. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming)

Kim, B. and Vasudevan, A. (2017). How to expect a surprising exam. Synthese (August 2017)

Malink, M. and Vasudevan, A. (2016). The logic of Leibniz’s Generales Inquisitiones de Analysi Notionum et Veritatum. Review of Symbolic Logic, 9:686–751

Vasudevan, A. (2013). On the a priori and a posteriori assessment of probabilities. Journal of Applied Logic, 11(4):440–451

Gaifman, H. and Vasudevan, A. (2012). Deceptive updating and minimal information methods. Synthese, 187(1):147–178

Media

Anubav Vasudevan on Elucidations

Recent Courses

PHIL 20012/30012 Accelerated Introduction to Logic

This course provides an introduction to logic for students of philosophy. It is aimed at students who possess more mathematical training than can be expected of typical philosophy majors, but who wish to study logic not just as a branch of mathematics but as a method for philosophical analysis. (II)

While no specific mathematical knowledge will be presupposed, some familiarity with the methods of mathematical reasoning and some prior practice writing prose that is precise enough to support mathematical proof will be useful.

Students may count either PHIL 20012 or PHIL 20100, but not both, toward the credits required for graduation.

2023-2024 Autumn
Category
Logic

PHIL 49702 Paper Revision and Publication Workshop

Preparing papers to submit to journals for review and revising papers in response to the feedback received from journal editors and referees is an essential part of professional academic life, and students applying for academic positions with no publications to their name are at a disadvantage in today’s highly competitive job market. The Department of Philosophy has therefore instituted the Paper Revision and Publication Workshop to provide our graduate students with support and assistance to prepare papers to submit for publication in academic philosophy journals. The workshop was designed with the following three aims in mind:

1. to provide students with a basic understanding of the various steps involved in publishing in academic journals and to create a forum in which students can solicit concrete advice from faculty members about the publishing process;

2. to direct and actively encourage students to submit at least one paper to a journal for review on a timeline that would allow accepted submissions to be listed as publications on a student’s CV by the time they go on the academic job market; and

3. to create and foster a departmental culture in which the continued revision of work with the ultimate aim of publication in academic journals is viewed as an essential aspect of the professional training of our graduate students and in which both faculty and students work together to establish more ambitious norms for publishing while in graduate school.

 

PhD students in Years 2-6, with approval by the DGS.

2022-2023 Spring

PHIL 49701 Topical Workshop

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam.

A two-quarter (Autumn, Winter) workshop for all and only philosophy graduate students in the relevant years.

2022-2023 Winter

PHIL 20012/30012 Accelerated Introduction to Logic

This course provides a first introduction to formal logic. In this course, we will introduce proof systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic and prove their soundness and completeness. (B) (II)

This course satisfies the Department of Philosophy’s logic requirement for the philosophy major. It is intended as an introduction to logic for students of philosophy with some background in mathematics. While no specific mathematical knowledge will be presupposed, some familiarity with the methods of mathematical reasoning and some prior practice writing prose that is precise enough to support mathematical proof will be required.

2022-2023 Autumn
Category
Logic

PHIL 31414 MAPH Core Course: Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

(MAPH 31414)

This course is designed to provide MAPH students – especially those interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy – with an introduction to some recent debates between philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The course is, however, neither a history of analytic philosophy nor an overview of the discipline as it currently stands. The point of the course is primarily to introduce the distinctive style and method – or styles and methods – of philosophizing in the analytic tradition, through brief explorations of some currently hotly debated topics in the field.

This course is open only to MAPH students. MAPH students who wish to apply to Ph.D. programs in Philosophy are strongly urged to take this course.

2022-2023 Autumn

PHIL 49701 Topical Workshop

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam.

 A two-quarter (Autumn, Winter) workshop for all and only philosophy graduate students in the relevant years.

2022-2023 Autumn

PHIL 49702 Revision Workshop

This is a workshop for 2nd year philosophy graduate students, in which students revise a piece of work to satisfy the PhD program requirements.

All and only philosophy graduate students in the relevant years.

2021-2022 Spring

PHIL 23210/33210 The Chicago School

Before there was a “Chicago School” of neo-classical economics, the School of Chicago referred to a wide-ranging set of philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical doctrines produced, in collaboration, by such prominent members of the University’s faculty as the philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and the psychologist and educator James Angell.  In a 1904 entry in the Psychological Bulletin, William James announced the entrance of the Chicago School onto the American intellectual scene, proclaiming: “Chicago has a School of Thought! a school of thought which, it is safe to predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for years to come… Professor John Dewey, and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many cooperating minds, of a view of the world, both theoretical and practical, which is so simple, massive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy.”

At the core of this system was the simple idea that all thinking, in even its most theoretical guise, must ultimately be viewed a form of practical activity. The abstract theories that are the end products of such thought, are, accordingly, nothing more than cognitive tools deriving their significance entirely from the instrumental role that they play in addressing the concrete needs for which they were devised. Behind this simple conceit lay a more elaborate conception of functionalist psychology and the logic of inquiry, according to which theory and practice, thinking and doing, are not to be viewed as separate spheres of human life. Each is instead to be understood with reference to the service it renders the other so as to effect a “continuous, uninterrupted, free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking… [One in which] observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods pass to use in description of the particular; inference passes into action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular task in question.” Upon such psychological and philosophical foundations, the theorists of the Chicago School attempted to erect a far-reaching  campaign of educational reform, in which the purpose of a university education was not to be conceived as the transmission of knowledge to students, but rather as the sharing of communal social experiences through which young people could be successfully integrated into a deliberative democratic society. 

In this course, we will undertake a critical examination of the psychological, philosophical, and pedagogical writings comprising the work of the Chicago School. The central text for the course will be Studies in Logical Theory, originally published in 1903, which collects together a number essays written by the original members of the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. (B)

2021-2022 Winter

PHIL 49701 Topical Workshop

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam.

 A two-quarter (Autumn, Winter) workshop for all and only philosophy graduate students in the relevant years.

2021-2022 Winter

PHIL 49701 Topical Workshop

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam.

A two-quarter (Autumn, Winter) workshop for all and only philosophy graduate students in the relevant years.

2021-2022 Autumn

PHIL 52002 C.S. Peirce: Logic and Metaphysics

This course will undertake a critical review of the some of the seminal logical and metaphysical writings of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce made numerous original contributions to the field of mathematical logic, particularly to the fields of relational and quantificational logic, and, in the first part of the course, we will carefully examine some of Peirce's most important writings on the subject. In the second half of the course, we will examine some of Peirce's most characteristic metaphysical doctrines. These include: triadism - the view that all experience may be classified within a tripartite scheme consisting of the categories of "firstness," "secondness," and "thirdness;" tychism - the view that objective chance is an operative feature of the cosmos; haecceitism - the view that individual substances have an essence de re and not merely de dicta; and synechism - the view that the cosmos is fundamentally a continuum, no part of which is fully separate or determinate. (II)

2021-2022 Autumn
Category
American Pragmatism
Logic

PHIL 22962/32962 The Epistemology of Deep Learning

Philosophers have long drawn inspiration for their views about the nature of human cognition, the structure of language, and the foundations of knowledge, from developments in the field of artificial intelligence. In recent years, the study of artificial intelligence has undergone a remarkable resurgence, in large part owing to the invention of so-called “deep” neural networks, which attempt to instantiate models of cognitive neurological development in a computational setting. Deep neural networks have been successfully deployed to perform a wide variety of machine learning tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing, financial fraud detection, social network filtering, drug discovery, and cancer diagnoses, to name just a few. While, at present, the ethical implications of these new and powerful systems are a topic of much philosophical scrutiny, the epistemological significance of deep learning has garnered significantly less attention.

In this course, we will attempt to understand and assess some of the bold epistemological claims that have been made on behalf of deep neural networks. To what extent can deep learning be represented within the framework of existing theories of statistical and causal inference, and to what extent does it represent a new epistemological paradigm? Are deep neural networks genuinely theory-neutral, as it is sometimes claimed, or does the underlying architecture of these systems encode substantive theoretical assumptions and biases? Without the aid of a background theory or statistical model, how can we, the users of a deep neural network, be in a position to trust the reliability of its predictions? In principle, are there any cognitive tasks with respect to which deep neural networks are incapable of outperforming human expertise? Do recent developments in artificial intelligence shed any new light on traditional philosophical questions about the capacity of machines to act intelligently, or the computational and mechanistic bases of human cognition? (B) (II)

2020-2021 Spring
Category
Epistemology

PHIL 29400/39600 Intermediate Logic

(HIPS 20500, CHSS 33600)

This course provides a first introduction to mathematical logic for students of philosophy. In this course we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic. (B) (II)

Elementary Logic (PHIL 20100/30000) or its equivalent.

2020-2021 Winter
Category
Logic

PHIL 22401/32401 Modern Logic and the Structure of Knowledge

In this course, we will examine the various ways in which the concepts and techniques of modern mathematical logic can be utilized to investigate the structure of knowledge. Many of the most well-known results of mathematical logic, such as the incompleteness theorems of Gödel and the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, illustrate the fundamental limitations of formal systems of logic to fully capture the structure of the semantic models in which truth and validity are assessed. Some philosophers have argued that these results have profound epistemological implications, for instance, that they can be used to ground skeptical claims to the effect that there must be truths that logic and mathematics are powerless to prove. One of the aims of this course is to assess the legitimacy of these epistemological claims. In addition, we will explore the extent to which the central results of mathematical logic can be extended so as to apply to systems of inductive logic, and examine what forms of inductive skepticism may emerge as a result. We will, for example, discuss the epistemological implications of Putnam's diagonalization argument, which shows that, for any Bayesian theory of confirmation based on a definable prior, there must exist hypotheses which, if true, can never be confirmed. (B) (II)

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Logic

PHIL 29400/39600 Intermediate Logic

(HIPS 20500, CHSS 33600)

This course provides a first introduction to mathematical logic. In this course we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic. (B) (II)

 Elementary Logic (PHIL 20100) or its equivalent.

2019-2020 Winter
Category
Logic

PHIL 20116/30116 American Pragmatism

This course is a first introduction to American Pragmatism. We will examine some of the seminal philosophical works of the three most prominent figures in this tradition: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Our main aim will be to extract from these writings the central ideas and principles which give shape to pragmatism as a coherent alternative to the two main schools of modern philosophical thought, empiricism and rationalism. (B) (III)

2019-2020 Autumn
Category
American Pragmatism

For full list of Anubav Vasudevan's courses back to the 2012-13 academic year, see our searchable course database.