Previous entires: #1, #2.

Firstly, if you happen to be in the area, make sure to catch my talk: ‘Why Quantifiers Cannot Carve at the Joints’, at The North Carolina Philosophical Society Meeting with the South Carolina Society for Philosophy, which takes place at Elon University, NC. My talk on the first day (February 24th), at 4:20pm, Belk 201. My other forthcoming talks are listed here.

UNC-CH -- The first state university (since 1795)

On the subject of talks, I gave my second talk this year last Monday right here in Chapel Hill. The mid-day slot on Monday is not the greatest, so I didn’t have a huge audience (maybe 15 people), but there was even a visitor all the way from the coast, and we did have a good discussion afterwards. The talk was on ‘The Epistemology of Essence‘ (click for an abstract and a draft of the paper).

What I got from the discussion is that I should perhaps try to motivate the whole project a little better for those who may be uneasy about (seriously) realist metaphysics, and essentialism in particular. In a way, the paper that it was based on is aimed at those who already accept a type of (neo-)Aristotelian conception of essence and Kit Fine’s idea that metaphysical modality reduces to essence in particular, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give something more to work with to those who don’t. Laurie Paul suggested that one way of doing this might be to include some discussion about scientific realism — indeed I do think that realism about essence is a prerequisite for any plausible version of scientific realism.

Around the Chapel Hill campus

Although any discussion like this will necessarily be a very small portion of The Epistemology of Essence paper, I did kind of get an idea for another paper from all this, one that would be a qualified defence of scientific realism understood from an essentialist perspective. What this means is basically that one has to acknowledge the existence of genuine, mind-independent natural kind essences (although note that these are not entities in themselves!). So, the paper could be called something like ‘There Is At Least One Natural Kind’, the thesis being that a foundation for natural science requires realism about natural kinds (or at least one of them), whether or not we can pick them out. The Epistemology of Essence paper, then, is a survey of our options regarding the epistemic access to these natural kind essences.

So, there’s some philosophical content for you — see, I have been working! In fact, just a bit after my talk we also had a meeting of the Metaphysics Reading Group. I opened the discussion since we read Kit Fine’s ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, which happens be the opening chapter of my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume. The presence of Peter van Inwagen was an added bonus — he recently bought a house in the area, and I understand that he’s on leave from Notre Dame, so he’s around, and participating in some events. Anyway, we should have some good discussions between Peter, Laurie, Thomas Hofweber, myself, and the bunch of grad students that attend more or less regularly. Fine’s ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ raised some interesting issues, although the discussion quickly steered away from the details of the paper. One of the main issues concerned the epistemology of some of the metaphysical problems that Kit identifies as being central to metaphysics — he doesn’t say much about this himself, but this is of course the very topic that I discussed in my talk earlier that day. (One of the important characteristics of metaphysics that Kit lists is its ‘eidicity’, namely that it concerns the essence or nature of things). We will be reading some van Inwagen for the next meeting, there’s a bunch of unpublished drafts and notes that he sent to the group waiting in my inbox, mainly on the topic of fundamentality; should be interesting…

Wildlife from our kitchen window

Apart from philosophy, I’ve been getting an average amount of running in, but the aerobic testing sessions that I mentioned in my last diary entry as well have still been taking some time from that — I’ve got my last session on Wednesday and I’ll write something more about the whole ordeal in another post once it’s all over. I’ve spent a lot of time just working at home and hanging out with Elizabeth, and, as you’ll know if you’ve been checking out my other posts, cooking! We’re cooking together virtually every night, and on top of that Elizabeth is always experimenting with some vegan baking, so I’ve got some very good reasons indeed to spend a lot of time at home… An additional feature of our kitchen is that there’s always some wildlife to look at. The squirrels I mentioned before, and I’m yet to get a good shot of the deer, but our latest entertainment were a bunch of these tiny birds: two males fighting over a female, it seemed. I didn’t get my camera out in time to capture the fight, but the pictures feature the birds in question. I don’t recognize them, but the males have beautiful blue plumage (quite like the Norwegian Blue, except these guys aren’t pining for fjords).

These two were picking on each other...

We did get out of Chapel Hill this past week though, as we made a trip to the nearby city of Durham (which, once again, is not the one in the UK!). It’s a city of just under quarter million people, making it the fifth largest in North Carolina, and much bigger than Chapel Hill. There isn’t that much to see though; in fact Durham is a rather ugly city, and certainly no match for its UK counterpart! No surprise though, as what Durham is famous for is tobacco: the cityscape is dominated by a Lucky Strike chimney… It was a rather rainy day as well, so I don’t have much photographic evidence. We did visit the Durham Arts Council (free), where there’s some local art on show, but the exhibition was tiny so we didn’t spend much time there.

Durham, NC -- Tobacco District

Rather more pleasant were the Bean Trader’s coffee shop and coffee roastery (we bought some beans too), and Cosmic Cantina, which claims to have ‘the best burritos on the planet’. Well, Elizabeth is the expert on this topic, having lived in San Francisco (where you supposedly get the best burritos), but these were certainly pretty good — I had a vegan tofu burrito with black beans which was great but could’ve been a little spicier. Finally, we hit Tyler’s Restaurant and Taproom right in the Tobacco District. The scene is not the most appealing, as they seem to be a family restaurant of sorts, but I wanted to go there mainly for the beer selection, which includes some 40 draft beers and a bunch of bottles. They did have some interesting rarities and seasonals, I was especially pleased to sample the excellent Founders Breakfast Stout, brewed with oats and coffee and rated extremely highly everywhere (my review here). By the way, all three of the mentioned places have locations in Chapel Hill as well, but we’ve yet to check them out.

Well, enough of all this, there’s a fresh batch of vegan maple sweet potato muffins waiting!