+We've sent around an email to those who left their email addresses on the roster we passed around. But it's clear that the roster didn't make its way to everyone. So if you didn't receive our email this evening, please email <mailto:jim.pryor@nyu.edu> with your email address, and if you're a student, say whether you expect to audit or take the class for credit.
+
+All students are invited to help us schedule, and then participate in, a regular student session in addition to the Monday seminar meetings. If you didn't receive our email about this, go to
+<http://www.doodle.com/e8eci7cr9ib8t7t3> as soon as you can and please tell us when you're available.
+
+## Assignments ##
+
+[[Assignment1]]
+
+
+## Overview ##
+
+The goal of this seminar is to introduce concepts and techniques from
+theoretical computer science and show how they can provide insight
+into established philosophical and linguistic problems.
+
+This is not a seminar about any particular technology or software.
+Rather, it's about a variety of conceptual/logical ideas that have been
+developed in computer science and that linguists and philosophers ought to
+know, or may already be unknowingly trying to reinvent.
+
+Philosphers and linguists tend to reuse the same familiar tools in
+ever more (sometime spectacularly) creative ways. But when your only
+hammer is classical logic, every problem looks like modus ponens. In
+contrast, computer scientists have invested considerable ingenuity in
+studying tool design, and have made remarkable progress.
+
+"Why shouldn't I reinvent some idea X for myself? It's intellectually
+rewarding!" Yes it is, but it also takes time you might have better
+spent elsewhere. After all, you can get anywhere you want to go by walking, but you can
+accomplish more with a combination of walking and strategic subway
+rides.
+
+More importantly, the idiosyncrasies of your particular
+implementation may obscure what's fundamental to the idea you're
+working with. Your implementation may be buggy in corner cases you
+didn't think of; it may be incomplete and not trivial to generalize; its
+connection to existing literature and neighboring issues may go
+unnoticed. For all these reasons you're better off understanding the
+state of the art.
+
+The theoretical tools we'll be introducing aren't very familiar to
+everyday programmers, but they are prominent in academic computer science,
+especially in the fields of functional programming and type theory.
+
+Of necessity, this course will lay a lot of logical groundwork. But throughout
+we'll be aiming to mix that groundwork with real cases
+in our home subjects where these tools play central roles. Our aim for the
+course is to enable you to make these tools your own; to have enough
+understanding of them to recognize them in use, use them yourself at least
+in simple ways, and to be able to read more about them when appropriate.
+
+Once we get up and running, the central focii of the course will be
+**continuations**, **types**, and **monads**. One of the on-going themes will
+concern evaluation order and issues about how computations (inferences,
+derivations) unfold in (for instance) time. The key analytic technique is to
+form a static, order-independent model of a dynamic process. We'll be
+discussing this in much more detail as the course proceeds.
+
+The logical systems we'll be looking at include:
+
+* the pure/untyped lambda calculus
+* combinatorial logic
+* the simply-typed lambda calculus
+* polymorphic types with System F
+* some discussion of dependent types
+* if time permits, "indeterministic" or "preemptively parallel" computation and linear logic
+
+
+<!--
+Other keywords:
+ recursion using the Y-combinator
+ evaluation-order stratgies
+ normalizing properties
+ the Curry-Howard isomorphism(s)
+ monads in category theory and computation
+-->
+
+## Who Can Participate? ##
+
+The course will not presume previous experience with programming. We
+will, however, discuss concepts embodied in specific programming
+languages, and we will encourage experimentation with running,
+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; 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.
+
+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.