Haim Gaifman

This class was dreadful for only one reason: prof. Gaifman. His utter lack of respect for his students' time showed through week after week. He was almost always late for lecture, and when he did arrive, he would be completely unprepared and disorganized, and somehow struggled each week to figure out how to use his own laptop and how to lower the projector screen. He would ALWAYS keep lecturing past the ending time for the class, sometimes by up to 15 minutes. Readings were typically distributed around 3-3:30am on the morning of lecture, giving students zero time to read in preparation for class. Assignments were always "hinted at" and never concrete, i.e. prof. Gaifman would hint that there would be a midterm paper, but never *actually* assign anything—no prompts, no expectations of content or quantity of work to be done, not even deadlines! It got so bad that the office of academic affairs had to step in and tell him that if he wants his students to do assignments, then he needs to tell them what the assignment is. Why it took university administrators to make that point clear to a professor is beyond me. He assigned the take-home final on the first day of finals week, a total of eight Peano arithmetic proofs. Then on the second to last day of finals week, he assigned an additional long paper to be written during Christmas, with the consolation that we could submit it via em…

The other reviews are fairly critical of Gaifman in one of two contexts: teaching an introductory logic class with insufficient pity or teaching a more subjective class with insufficient structure. Perhaps he is not the right professor to take in those contexts; however, in an upper level formal logic (think mathematics) course like this, his style of instruction is a bit more palatable. Though he still struggled with pacing, he typed up well-structured notes for us. And his explanations and proofs were always thorough enough. Though he moved between levels of abstraction, for the more advanced audience, this was not a big issue. I enjoyed this class and learned from Gaifman. In terms of material, we covered self-reference and fixed-points, Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, Peano's and Robinson's theories of arithmetic, computability and undecidability in these theories, the Rosser trick, Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, and a bit more on provability logic. Some of the topics require a lot of thought to understand even the theorem statements, though the proof techniques were always straightforward. Gaifman made a very nice presentation of the basic material, leading us into it in a very natural way. Instead of proving the theorems very formally, he provided good intuition about what we were doing. This totaled around 50 pages in his typed notes, and to me, it felt a…

There is one other review for this class so far (below). It is not completely unwarranted, as most students clearly did not enjoy the seminar and had similar reactions. But I would have to disagree about a few things. First of all, this class was on "Analytic Philosophy." It presupposes that you know what analytic philosophy is and you have done some other work in the subject. It is a majors seminar, after all. What Gaifman tries to do throughout the class is touch on certain basic tools and concepts in analytic philosophy in order to give students a rough idea of what this sort of work looks like on an advanced level. I think he accomplishes this task. There is a catch, though: analytic philosophy is DIFFICULT. It demands incredible precision and a good handle on a very specific conceptual framework. Secondly, Gaifman tries to teach this class through instances of analytic philosophy. He begins with Frege's seminal, "On Sense and Reference." This paper revolutionized philosophy. Ever since Frege's rediscovery by Russell and others, philosophy has never been the same. This is why Gaifman spends SO much time on this one, short paper. He doesn't do a bad job. After six weeks on Frege, he expects you to have a good handle on the system he has been discussing. It's not at all unrealistic of him to expect a good 5-page synthesis. The other examples he uses are: Quine's, "Quantifier…

He is perhaps one of the best set theorists in America. However, he does fail to realize that when he teaches an advanced formal concept, the audience does not have the necessary formal background to follow along. He will say that you only need introductory symoblic logic, but then move far too fast and do far too much rigor for someone with only that training. I had actually studied logic in many, many classes and have a good handle on the subject, and found his lecture on the Completeness Proof difficult to follow. Otherwise, though, he is extremely informative and--at least for papers--not an unreasonable grader. He is difficult to get ahold of, rarely holds office hours, and is intimidating. I would recommend him strongly, IF you have a strong background in the subject already. In that case, you will find his presentations extremely helpful to know the more detailed and rigorous concepts of the given subject.

This class was one big mix up. He didn't make any prerequisites for the class, but expected that everyone intuitively had a working knowledge of set theory, Boolean algebra and symbolic logic. Some of us did, but some didn't, and made sure that he knew that they didn't. He wanted to spend the class time teaching the philosophy of probability and induction, but ended up just teaching elementary probability and Boolean algebra all semester. All in all the workload was fine. We had written math type homework about every week, but they didn't really count for much. Our grades were based on our final projects- either a philosophical paper about a few chapters from this book, or around 10 somewhat difficult probability problems, or both if you wanted.

Professor Gaifman is one of the most attentive professors I have ever had at Columbia who will take interest and become personally invested in your success in the class with one (easily avoidable) catch--it is up to the student to initiate the dialogue, and to do so early on in the course. The course is challenging and invovles lots of (very confusing) readings that go quite in depth on certain issues (what on Earth is Wittgenstein REALLY trying to say...ever?), as the subject is quite abstract and requires at least a basic understanding of elementary logic. His lectures are well-organized and his presentation of the material is thorough and clear. He is a tough grader, but like I said, he is not at all unfair. Be sure to go to office hours whenever possible, to attend most of the lectures, and to go to office hours. He has been one of my favorite professors at Columbia, and even though this has been one of the most challenging classes I have taken, I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

I think the Haifman gets a bad rap. I like him a great deal. He's cute, fat, with an adorable Israeli accent. He is not a great teacher, but he generally explains things thoroughly enough that his lack of communicative abilities are overcome. His text book is terrible. But if you want to learn Symbolic Logic, really learn it, this is the class to take. All you philosophy majors will have to readjust your minds to the system, but if you do that and work hard, you will succeed and you will know the material like Jenna knows Rocco. If you want an easy class, take Varzi. If you want to have a mind that picks up logical errors like a Hoover, take Gaifman.

meaning (Grice), speech act (Austin, Searle), sense and reference (Frege)

The only work in this class was exercises; some were assigned week-to-week, others comprised a take-home midterm and final. We were not required to do them all, but I managed to. Some of the exercises took more effort to parse than to solve, though I am not sure if that was due to how meta the topics are or a flaw in how they were posed. Some of the proofs and deductions were kind of tedious when done to a sufficient level of rigor, and others were amazingly insightful and only a few lines. Really a mixed bag. I'm not sure exactly how the problems were graded, though I think I got the final grade I deserved. According to the syllabus, the grade is 10% participation, 20% exercises throughout the semester, and 70% exam. However, I never received grades for these individual components.

The seminar was not a success. The topic of the seminar was announced on the first day of class, there was no real syllabus or introductory material for the course, only a list of potential topics, which were not all covered - and this also meant that assignments were often given on Friday or Saturday for a class held on Tuesday. Office hours were not held, and access to Professor Gaifman was difficult through e-mail, and while he hinted at being available by phone, his number was not actually given out. The only 'office hours' that were held were mandatory, right after class, and only for those who did especially badly on the homework. Besides being told what the course material was, we were never really told why we were reading it or analyzing it. After six weeks of Frege, we still didn't really have a clear sense of what Frege was talking about, or why the things he was talking about were relevant. This became apparent after our paper on Frege was handed in, and we were all forced to go to 'office hours' for writing bad papers. Professor Gaifman dominated discussion in what he wanted to be a discussion class, and when questions or suggestions were raised, he would dismiss them as inaccurate, laugh them off, or seem to get annoyed. Whether this was the case or not, it came off as incredibly intimidating, and did not encourage seeking him out to clarify the material that was…