Diary of Doctor Logic
Sara L. Uckelman
Sara Uckelman is the professor of logic at Durham University, co-director of the Durham Centre for Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and deputy director of liberal arts. Her research in formal logic focuses on formal modelling and interactive logic, bringing together techniques from logic and computer science to explore and understand reasoning in historical contexts.
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All posts (10)
I wrote this up for my dissertation students back in 2018, and just found the document again now. It’s useful advice, and if I put it here, it will be easier for me to find it again/reference it in the future. While it’s aimed at UG dissertations, the advice is applicable to other academic work, and some (but not...
Fiction Ba Ki Ba, Thrice Married to a Salted Fish (vol. 1 finished November 21, 2025): Not me sobbing my heart out during the final chapter of the first volume of a series — and now I have to wait until February for volume 2! The two main characters in this story I found fascinating, and the way the twist was slowly...
…that I’ve given to my academic advisees this year so far. Reading philosophy is a particular skill, which means it’s something that can be taught and learned. It does get easier with practice. Accept that some of it is hard, and you’re going to have to read it multiples times over, and you may still not get exactly...
When I was new staff at Durham, I did a PGCAP (Post-Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice) en route to obtaining Fellowship in the Higher Education Academy (which I think is now called “Advance HE”). One of the assignments for the certificate required us to engage with pedagogical literature relevant to our...
At the Principia conference last week, I was invited by GRIFA (GRupo Interinstitucional de Filosofias Analyticas), to give a workshop on the topic of methodology. Since I was given two hours — one the first night of the conference, one the last night, I decided to make it a proper workshop: I mostly lectured the...
Last Wednesday I received the excellent news that a “major project” application a colleague and I submitted to Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study has been awarded funding. From October 2025 to September 2028 (which intense focus October – December 2026), we will be investigating “Community as an Enabler of...
This post follows on from this one. So, you’re deeply mired in the “writing-as-discovery” process, finding out all sorts of interesting things, swapping between writing and reading as you come across questions you need to answer, and coming up with all sorts of ideas: Now what? How do you organise all those ideas...
As an academic whose been writing undergraduate essays, master’s papers, a PhD thesis, and journal articles for decades without knowing that she was doing it with ADHD, I’ve developed a whole bunch of writing processes that work very effectively for me and which when I share them with my ND students resonate quite a...
2024 was a hard year, reading wise. As I noted in last year’s round-up, in September 2023 I stopped reading. J did his usual and got me some really wonderfully fascinating looking books for Christmas, and I started one of them soon after, and it took me until the end of May to finish it. But then — also in late May...
At some point along my path towards an ADHD/autism diagnosis, I was asked if any of the adults that knew me as a child — parents, teachers — ever raised any concerns, to which I’ve always had to say “nope, not a one”: Because I was homeschooled, so my teachers and my parents were the same, and one of the best parts,...
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