Ars Mathematica

The latest issue of the Post-Autistic Economics Review is now out, available here.   It has an interesting article by philosopher Donald Gillies arguing against the centrally-organized reviews of university research activities which British academics have had to endure these last 20 years, and which now look likely to be adopted in Australia, NZ and elsewhere.  One argument he makes is that one’s peers are usually quite bad at judging the long-run impact and quality of one’s research, especially when the research is innovative, and Gillies gives the example of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, the first axiomatic treatment of propositional and predicate calculus.  When this was published in 1879, it was slammed by Frege’s contemporaries, and it was only recognized for the seminal work it is two decades later.  If Frege had been working in a British University a hundred years later, both he and his department may have faced termination by his university administration, given the hostility that his own peers felt towards his work; lots of departments have been closed, and academics made unemployed, as a result of the peer assessments of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

A longer version of Gillies’ paper is available on his web-site, here.