-Philosophy COURSENUMBER and Linguistics COURSENUMBER
-SHORT COURSE TITLE?
+# Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language #
or: **What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn't Know To Ask**
+This course will be co-taught by [Chris Barker](http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/) and [Jim Pryor](http://www.jimpryor.net/). Linguistics calls it "G61.3340-002" and Philosophy calls it "G83.2296-001."
+
+
## Announcements ##
-The course meets starting on XXX, at ZZZ, in room YYY.
+The seminar meets on Mondays from 4-6, in
+the Linguistics building at 10 Washington Place, in room 104 (back of the first floor).
+
+One student session will be held every Wednesday from 3-4. The other will be arranged to fit the schedule of those who'd like to attend but can't make the Wednesday time. (We first proposed Tuesdays from 11-12, but this time turns out not to be so helpful.) If you're one of the students who wants to meet for Q&A at some other time in the week, let us know.
+
+You should see the student sessions as opportunities to clear up lingering issues from material we've discussed, and help get a better footing for what we'll be doing the next week. It would be smart to make a serious start on that week's homework, for instance, before the session.
+
+There is now a [[lambda evaluator]] you can use in your browser (no need to install any software).
+It can help you check whether your answer to some of the homework questions works correctly.
+
+There is now a [library](/lambda_library) of lambda-calculus arithmetical and list operations, some relatively advanced.
+
+There's also a page of [[miscellaneous lambda challenges and advanced topics]].
+
+
+
+<!--
+ To play around with a **typed lambda calculus**, which we'll look at later
+ in the course, have a look at the [Penn Lambda Calculator](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/lambda/).
+ This requires installing Java, but provides a number of tools for evaluating
+ lambda expressions and other linguistic forms. (Mac users will most likely
+ already have Java installed.)
+-->
+
+
+## Lecture Notes and Assignments ##
+
+(13 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week1]]; [[Assignment1]].
+
+Topics: Applications; Basics of Lambda Calculus; Comparing Different Languages
+
+(20 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week2]]; [[Assignment2]].
+
+Topics: Reduction and Convertibility; Combinators; Evaluation Strategies and Normalization; Decidability; Lists and Numbers
+
+(27 Sept) Lecture notes for [[Week3]]; [[Assignment3]].
+
+Topics: Recursion with Fixed Point Combinators
+
+(4 Oct) Lecture notes for Week 4
+
+<!-- Introducing the notion of a "continuation", which technique we'll now already have used a few times
+-->
+
+[[Upcoming topics]]
+
+
+##[[Offsite Reading]]##
+There's lots of links here already to tutorials and encyclopedia entries about many of the notions we'll be dealing with.
-## Overview ##
+
+
+## Course Overview ##
The goal of this seminar is to introduce concepts and techniques from
theoretical computer science and show how they can provide insight
the Curry-Howard isomorphism(s)
monads in category theory and computation
-->
-
+
## Who Can Participate? ##
The course will not presume previous experience with programming. We
modifying, and writing computer programs.
The course will not presume lots of mathematical or logical background, either.
-However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material.
-And it wouldn't be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course
+However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material; as a result,
+it will not be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course
in formal semantics or philosophy of language. If you have concerns about your
background, come discuss them with us.
-It hasn't yet been decided whether this course counts for satisfying the logic requirement for
-Philosophy PhD students.
+This class will count as satisfying the logic requirement for Philosophy
+PhD students; however if this would be your first or only serious
+engagement with graduate-level formal work you should consider
+carefully, and must discuss with us, (1) whether you'll be adequately
+prepared for this course, and (2) whether you'd be better served by
+taking a logic course (at a neighboring department, or at NYU next year)
+with a more canonical syllabus.
-Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are wlecome
+
+Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are welcome
to audit, to the extent that this coheres well with the needs of our local
students.
-## Recommended Readings and Software ##
+## Recommended Software ##
+
+During the course, we'll be encouraging you to try out various things in Scheme
+and Caml, which are prominent *functional programming languages*. We'll explain
+what that means during the course.
+
+* **Scheme** is one of two major dialects of *Lisp*, which is a large family
+of programming languages. Scheme
+is the more clean and minimalistic dialect, and is what's mostly used in
+academic circles.
+Scheme itself has umpteen different "implementations", which share most of
+their fundamentals, but have slightly different extensions and interact with
+the operating system differently. One major implementation used to be called
+PLT Scheme, and has just in the past few weeks changed their name to Racket.
+This is what we recommend you use. (If you're already using or comfortable with
+another Scheme implementation, though, there's no compelling reason to switch.)
+
+ Racket stands to Scheme in something like the relation Firefox stands to HTML.
+
+* **Caml** is one of two major dialects of *ML*, which is another large
+family of programming languages. Caml has only one active implementation,
+OCaml, developed by the INRIA academic group in France.
+
+* Those of you with some programming background may have encountered a third
+prominent functional programming language, **Haskell**. This is also used a
+lot in the academic contexts we'll be working through. Its surface syntax
+differs from Caml, and there are various important things one can do in
+each of Haskell and Caml that one can't (or can't as easily) do in the
+other. But these languages also have a lot in common, and if you're
+familiar with one of them, it's not difficult to move between it and the
+other.
- *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992/ref=pd_sim_books/103-5471398-9229403#reader_0262560992).
-This is a classic text introducing the gentle art of programming, using the functional programming language Scheme.
-Many people love this book, but it has an unusual dialog format that is not to everybody's taste.
-**Of particular interest for this course** is the explanation of the Y combinator, available as a free sample chapter
-[at the MIT Press web page for the book](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/).
+[[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
- [[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
+[[Family tree of functional programming languages]]
+
+
+## Recommended Books ##
+
+It's not necessary to purchase these for the class. But they are good ways to get a more thorough and solid understanding of some of the more basic conceptual tools we'll be using.
+
+* *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris
+Hankin, currently $17 on
+[Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Lambda-Calculi-Computer-Scientists/dp/0954300653).
+
+* (Another good book covering the same ground as the Hankin book, but
+more thoroughly, and in a more mathematical style, is *Lambda-Calculus and Combinators:
+an Introduction*, by J. Roger Hindley and Jonathan P. Seldin. If you choose to read
+both the Hankin book and this book, you'll notice the authors made some different
+terminological/notational choices. At first, this makes comprehension slightly slower,
+but in the long run it's helpful because it makes the arbitrariness of those choices more salient.)
+
+
+* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias
+Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992).
+This is a classic text introducing the gentle art of programming, using the
+functional programming language Scheme. Many people love this book, but it has
+an unusual dialog format that is not to everybody's taste. **Of particular
+interest for this course** is the explanation of the Y combinator, available as
+a free sample chapter [at the MIT Press web page for the
+book](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/).
+
+* *The Seasoned Schemer*, also by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, currently $28
+on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Seasoned-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/026256100X)
+
+* *The Little MLer*, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, currently $27
+on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Little-MLer-Matthias-Felleisen/dp/026256114X).
+This covers some of the same introductory ground as The Little Schemer, but
+this time in ML. It uses another dialect of ML (called SML), instead of OCaml, but there are only
+superficial syntactic differences between these languages. [Here's a translation
+manual between them](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html).
-## Schedule of Topics ##
-To be added.
----
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