Lesser Feasts

My time in Edinburgh is drawing to a close, so I'm beginning to wrap things up. Yesterday I gave my research talk to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities -- quite a different experience from the first two times, since it was all disembodied. I was very careful to make the talk accessible to a broad audience of humanities folks, which is not easy for a fairly technical subject that requires a good bit of background to motivate it. Judging by the comments and questions, I think I succeeded, though at the expense of annoying the one other philosopher in the group, who clearly wanted a technical talk on the metaphysics of substances, powers, and dispositions, instead of the general-audience talk on virtues and the good life that I had so carefully prepared. (This particular philosopher practices that version of philosophy-as-blood-sport that I associate in particular with, well, her department, of which I used to be a member.) After my talk I turned in the keys to my of...

I put on decent clothes last night for the first time since I've been in Edinburgh. I had a reservation at Café St Honoré, a wonderful little French restaurant down a cobbled street in the New Town. It's the sort of place where posh people in Alexander McCall Smith's novels are always having dinner for some special occasion. My special occasion was the end of my fourteen-day self-isolation. The decent clothes, I must say, were a bit snug. A basically sedentary two weeks had done wonders for my Anselm bibliography and my progress on the second Brahms violin sonata, but it had not been kind to my waistline. Five pounds, maybe. But I had neglected to remind myself that the reason I can always eat everything I want in Edinburgh and still lose weight is that I'm walking. All the time. Everywhere. Which I hadn't been. For two weeks. The modest protest from my waistband notwithstanding, I set out for dinner. Such freedom to do as I pleased, to walk along the streets of thi...

You know you've spent too much time in Scotland -- wait, that's a conceptual impossibility; let's start that again -- you know you've spent a delightfully rich amount of time in Scotland when Adamnan of Iona comes up in the calendar and you think, "Ah, yes. Adamnan of Iona," rather than, "Who?" But in case you're wondering, Adamnan was abbot of Iona around 700; he was kinsman and hagiographer of the much better-known Saint Columba. (I have to justify the name of this blog somehow.) On this ninth day of self-isolation I think I have finally hit my stride. Not that I wasn't being reasonably productive before, but more things fell into place today. I finally started writing my chapter on Scotus's account of the virtues. (The virtues are not that important in Scotus's ethics, but the reasons they're not important are important.) I attended the weekly research-in-progress seminar for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities...