I’ve been back from my ventures in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of days now, but I thought I’d write a few words about my brief visit to Portland, OR towards the end of the trip. Note that I’ve also added some photos from the trip to my gallery (see the previous link).

My talk at Reed College

The main purpose of my visit to Portland was to give a talk, ‘Grounding Modality’ at Reed College. I had prepared a fancy presentation using Prezi for the first time, which you can see here. I didn’t perhaps take full advantage of all the features and the presentation is not as smooth as it could be, but mostly I just wanted to play around and see if Prezi might be a good presentation software. The presentation did receive a fairly positive response at Reed, so I think I’ll have another go. It was a pleasure to visit Reed, my thanks to Paul Hovda for organizing the talk, and for the dinner afterwards! I gave a much shorter version of the talk at ECAP 7 in Milan in September, and I’ve explained the basic concept of this paper before. It’s a very controversial thesis: abandoning the duality of possibility and necessity in order to explain away metaphysical impossibilities which are nevertheless conceptually or logically possible. Well, I got some good feedback at Reed and I’m now less confident that I can, or need to, abandon duality altogether — I may wish to maintain it in the case of metaphysical modality at least. There are other aspects of the paper which are independent of this though: at the very least I wish to emphasize the importance of defining each subspecies of modality in order of a certain proper subsets of the furniture of the world, and I hope that this might help us to gain some insight into modal epistemology. But I need to get back to the paper when I’ve got some time, and perhaps I’ll post a new draft later.

The Portland Elk

Portland itself is a lovely city, infamous for its alternative crowd. Nowhere except in NYC have I seen such a selection of vegan restaurants, and Portland is only the size of Helsinki! In fact, Reed College treated myself and Elizabeth to a lovely dinner at one of these: Portobello — an Italian style vegan restaurant. The concept is interesting as I have not had much vegan Italian food, except at home. It’s a little upscale, but pleasant enough, and the food was excellent (I had the eggplant ravioli). Also worth noting are the numerous breakfast joints, I can recommend at least the Vita Cafe, which does a nice selection of vegan and vegetarian breakfasts (I had a Mexican tempeh scramble with some delicious spelt toast and potatoes). It’s not just the food selection that’s impressive in Portland though, their coffee, especially from Stumptown Coffee Roasters is beyond comparison. Not that I know much about coffee (as of yet), but the fact that I was able to drink and enjoy the normal French press stuff there instead of just the espressos means that it must be pretty good. In terms of beer, Portland has more breweries than is appropriate for a city of this size! Unfortunately I only had time to visit one of them, Hopworks Urban Brewery, but I’ve had good beers by Rogue and Deschutes as well. HUB did a nice ten beer sampler of everything that they had on tap, but rather disappointingly they only had one stout at the moment and no porters. I suspect that this might change in the winter though. In any case, their 7-grain stout is very good, as was, surprisingly, their lager.

Well, so much for Portland, I’m back in Helsinki now, although off to Amsterdam later today to run the Amsterdam marathon on Sunday. I’ve got a few days to wonder around after that, hoping to spend some time in the famous brown pubs and do some photography if the weather is nice. I’ve been to Amsterdam several times before, so no compulsory tourist activities. Be on the lookout for a race report too.

HUB Sampler