1. How did you get interested in logic?
SJS: As an undergraduate student in Korea, I wanted to study philosophy of art. My dream was to go to Paris and work on Merleau-Ponty! But there were no scholarships for me in France, and I had no money. So instead, I went to Ohio State – they gave me a good scholarship there. I had to take a variety of basic courses: epistemology, aesthetics, logic, etc. I liked the logic class, which was taught by George Schumm, but I never thought I would specialize in the field. However, at the end of my first year, I visited a friend at Stanford, and fell in love with the beauty of the campus. I could not believe my eyes – it was so beautiful, I thought I must be dreaming! I decided I had to transfer. I applied the following year and got in (it was in 1987). That is when prob-lems started: no one had asked me what I wanted to study, and I had not re-alized that they did not do philosophy of art. At the time, philosophy at Stanford was very good, but very small, and they strongly emphasized logic. It was very much "love it or leave it." But then something else happened: I took a class with Jon Barwise, and then another by John Etchemendy just afterwards. They were truly fantastic teachers, both of them. They changed my whole life. I decided to catch up on logic, and took a lot of computer science classes, too. I also decided to write my first paper in that area.
Interviste
Conversation with Sun-Joo Shin
di David Waszek
31.01.2018
Sun-Joo Shin è Professor of Philosophy alla Yale University. È nota per il suo lavoro pionieristico sul ragionamento diagrammatico. Nel suo primo libro, The Logical Status of Diagrams (1994), ha elaborato il primo esempio completamente sviluppato di un sistema logico basato su diagrammi (in questo caso, diagrammi di Venn). Il suo secondo libro, The Iconic Logic of Pierce's Graphs (2002), ha attirato l'attenzione su un sistema logico diagrammatico ideato da Charles Peirce, i "grafici esistenziali". Shin ha messo a punto nuovi modi di leggere questi grafici e mostrato come e perché i punti di forza dei grafici di Peirce siano stati sistematicamente trascurati e incompresi dai logici successivi. Nei suoi articoli, Shin ha anche gettato nuova luce su vari problemi in filosofia della logica e della matematica tenendo in considerazione il fatto che nella pratica il ragionamento si avvale spesso di varie forme di rappresentazione, tra cui i diagrammi. In quest'intervista, Shin discute il suo itinerario filosofico e le motivazioni al cuore del suo lavoro e racconta con schiettezza aspetti personali della propria carriera.
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