Logic Seminar

The Logic Seminar is a joint LOS/IMAR/ILDS seminar, featuring talks on mathematical logic, philosophical logic and logical aspects of computer science.

All seminars, except where otherwise indicated, will be on Thursdays between 14:00 and 16:00, Bucharest time. The seminars are held locally at Hall 214 (“Google”) of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, but can also be occasionally held remotely.

To receive announcements about the seminar, please send an email to logic-seminar@ilds.ro.

Organizers: Laurențiu Leuștean, Andrei Sipoș

Past Talks in 2024-2025

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Marian Călborean (University of Bucharest)

The minimal ontology of time – a unified axiomatization

Abstract:

How minimal can ontology be and still accommodate the main logical and metaphysical stances about time? I present a first-order set-theoretic framework, no stronger than ZFC, in which (i) the underlying axioms are pairwise independent; (ii) the canonical positions in temporal metaphysics, from presentism and the growing-block (cf. Prior 1967; Cameron 2015) to eternalism (Sider 2001) and Fine’s fragmentalism (Fine 2005), become parameter settings; (iii) standard well-behaved tense, metric, or interval logics (Prior’s PF, MTL, ITL) receive a sound and complete semantics via a representation theorem. On grounds of explanatory reach and parsimony, the growing-block emerges as the least problematic ontology of time within this minimal framework.

Past Seminars