Lesser Feasts

Content warning: nekkid dudes in a weird painting. ***** I did a rough calculation: there were about 300 papers at this conference. Apart from the plenary talks, there were eleven sessions running concurrently at any given time. That's a lot of medieval philosophy -- more than I have an appetite for. But I missed more sessions than I would have liked, because my jet lag was absolutely brutal this time. ***** When I wasn't listening to papers or sleeping, I was out walking. I love long walks in cities. Paris was having a warm spell, and I made the (in retrospect obviously stupid) decision to walk all the way from my hotel to Sacré Cœur, a solid two miles away, on the hottest and sunniest day. Thanks to a timely rest and a liter of water, I was fine. My heart quailed when I reached the foot of the steps. Maybe I should take the funicular. No. Don't be ridiculous. You've climbed the Seven Hills of Edinburgh. You've walked in the Highlands. It's just steps. Turns ou...

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 honestly had not known until a few days ago that Edinburgh, like so many other cities, is traditionally said to be built on seven hills. Thanks to this video , I learned that I had already walked up four of them. One walks up Castle Rock in the normal course of touristy things. I've been on Calton Hill any number of times, most memorably after the early-morning Easter Vigil at Old St Paul's a few years ago, when I joined the choir for their traditional singing of the Hallelujah Chorus on the National Monument (albeit in C, because who has those notes at that hour?). I've posted here about my occasional outings to Arthur's Seat. And this past weekend I went up Craiglockhart Hill. Having put in a particularly good day of work yesterday -- though honestly I still don't know whether my brilliant set piece about sins ex certa malitia  in Aquinas and Scotus is actually any good, or just one of those cases of my typing outrunning my thinking -- I decided that this after...