Previous entires: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8.

So, it’s time for my last diary entry. I’m heading to the West Coast in just under a week, but things have been winding down here already since late April. There’s an end of the year party this Saturday, so this will make for a natural ending to my series of diaries. However, I will be back in North Carolina towards the end of June, for the Carolina Metaphysics Workshop, and I’ll be sure to report about that.

The Chapel Hill Bell Tower

There isn’t an awful lot to report, since I’ve mainly been revising and writing up some of my papers, but there are a few things that I want to mention. The first of those is something that has been all over the media here in North Carolina pretty much right from when we arrived in January: the proposed amendment to the state constitution. Now, this doesn’t involve me in any way directly — obviously I don’t have the right to vote here — but the whole ordeal has had so much visibility and political significance that I feel I should comment on it somehow. I first learned about the proposed amendment when I saw banners calling people to vote against the amendment. A quick search revealed what it was about: introducing a ban for same-sex marriages into the state constitution. Of course, same-sex marriages were already illegal, but the amendment makes it much more difficult to ever change that. Now, as you may have heard, the amendment passed, with 61.05% voting in favour. I was rather surprised about the result, but that’s largely because Chapel Hill is at the very heart of the most liberal area of the state; most of the surrounding counties voted against.

I’m not going go into the argument for and against the amendment (but see the previous link for a summary). What is more interesting to me anyway are the political implications. The most obvious of these is the upcoming presidential election. Interestingly, Obama waited until today to announce his stand on the whole same-sex marriage issue, and he explicitly sides with the LGBT community. This is of course a bit of a turnaround for Obama, and I suspect that it’s primarily a strategic move to support his campaign — Biden was already known to support same-sex marriage. It’s a gamble, as while the majority of Americans apparently support same sex-marriage, it is nevertheless banned in 31 states. Well, I’m not one to get into politics, but what is surprising to me about the situation is that while nearly all other countries in the world are moving forward on this issue, the US is actually moving backward.

My talk at Duke University

Leaving that issue behind, I did want to say something about my recent talk at Duke University in Durham. I was originally scheduled to give the talk at the end of March, but due to sad circumstances which I mentioned in my previous diary entry, the talk got postponed. I’m pleased that we were able to reschedule, as it was a pleasure to give a talk at Duke. My talk was on ‘Quantification and Ontological Realism’ — basically a critical note on Ted Sider’s recent book. You can find the Prezi slides here. I haven’t posted the draft yet, but I’m working on a short Analysis-style piece based on this talk, and I’d welcome comments if anyone is willing to read it (drop me a message or leave a comment). I had a decent audience at Duke, and there was a good discussion afterwards, involving Sara Bernstein, Alex Rosenberg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Ferejohn, David Sanford, and others. I won’t go into the details here — I’ve written about the topic on the blog before — but I may post the draft at some point. I am also planning on a popular science inspired post about the Higgs boson, which I used as one of my examples in the talk (and elsewhere). Myself and Elizabeth were also wined and dined at one of the top restaurants in the area, Nana’s — where the chef improvised a vegan menu for us. Thanks to Duke folks for their hospitality and the interesting discussion!

Carolina North Forest

Well, I don’t have much else to report. In brief, it has been way too hot here, I’ve tried to do a little bit of work, and I’ve gotten back to decent running mileage (managed a 73.4 mile or 118km week last week, my highest mpw this year). Today I’m not feeling great though, hopefully I’m not getting ill again. I’ve effectively said my goodbyes to the Carolina North Forest, where I’ve done the bulk of my running (the recent Philosopher’s Way race took place there as well). Other than that I’ve been getting through the collection of craft beers that I accumulated whilst here (some beer reviews coming up soon), and I’ve fiddled around with this new WordPress theme, which is fortunately slowly finding its final shape (but I still need to fix a few things).

Next Tuesday I’m off to Seattle and will be heading straight down to California from there. From May 21-28 I’ll be in San Francisco (let me know if you’re in the area!) and after that it’s a road trip with stops at least in Yellowstone, Colorado, Utah (Zion), and a bunch of national parks — I’ll try to report from the road. Before that I hope to get a post up about my previous road trip in Deep South, I’m just trying to get through the photos!

Previous entires: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7.

A little bit of quiet time on the blog due to travelling and moving house. I’ve got a lot to report, but I think I’ll keep this one fairly short and write more about my travels in a dedicated post. Briefly: I was in Boulder, Colorado for a couple of days to give a talk on (Neo-)Aristotelian Essentialism (Prezi slides) and also to check out the place, as I’ve heard nice things about it. Another trip followed immediately after I got back as my Finnish friend Pekka was visiting. We (Pekka, Elizabeth and myself) did a road trip of 3000 miles in a week, checking out places like New Orleans (LA), Tampa (FL), Miami (FL), Everglades National Park (FL), Jacksonville (FL), and Myrtle Beach (SC). Quite a lot of the time was spent in Florida. I’ll comment on Boulder below, but the road trip deserves a post of its own (once I’ve gone through the photos).

A little teaser from the road trip: an alligator in the wild in Florida.

To begin with, some very sad news: Iris Einheuser, a young metaphysician at Duke, died towards the end of March. Indeed, this happened just a day before my scheduled talk at Duke. I learned about it only two hours before the talk, but we decided to cancel the talk because of this. I didn’t know Iris personally, but she has recently published several articles relevant to my work as well. There are a couple of remembrances of her up on the blogs.

Regarding my cancelled talk at Duke, ‘Quantification and Ontological Realism’, it has now been rescheduled for next week, Thursday, April 26th, from 11:30am to 1:30pm.

Our house for the last month in Chapel Hill

As I mentioned, we’ve also moved to a new house — immediately after getting back from the road trip in fact! So, you can see why it has been quiet on the blog… The new place is closer to the campus than our previous one, but it’s much smaller, just a bedroom and a kitchen really, and the kitchen and bathroom are straight from the 1940s. Despite this, it’s in fact more expensive than the luxury house we had for the first three and a half months. Frankly, it’s a bit crap, but it’s only for a month, and at least the location is pretty good. The campus is easily accessed by bike, and there’s a good coffee shop, Caffé Driade, just a 3min walk away. Fortunately there’s also a good access to running trails from here as well. We have upstairs neighbours now: a couple also visiting UNC-Chapel Hill, and it turned out that one of them is visiting the philosophy department as well! Quite a coincidence. Anyway, one unfortunate thing about this house is the sorry state of the kitchen, which means that I won’t be posting many more recipes or food posts this summer (I do still have a few old ones lined up though).

Essence! Spotted in New Orleans, Louisiana.

What else? Well, the term is slowly coming to its end, and on May 15th we’re off to the West Coast. I’ve still got the talk at Duke, but there aren’t many events of note left. Given the temporary housing and it’s inferior quality, I’m rather looking forward to the West Coast in fact. I’ll write about my plans for the rest of my US visit later on, but we’ve already confirmed a visit to San Francisco between May 21-28. Other than that I’m only limited by a flight back from Denver, Colorado on June 25th. Back to Raleigh-Durham that is, for the Carolina Metaphysics workshop.

Ah, I said I’d mention something about Boulder as well. Nothing but positives! I absolutely loved the place, and Colorado in general seems pretty good too. I flew to Denver International. On the train from the terminal into the main building, the mayor of Denver — who apparently used to own a brewery — announces that there are over 100 breweries in Colorado, and that they are in the business of having fun. Well, sounds good to me. I know a number of excellent Colorado breweries, such as New Belgium and Great Divide, and learned about a couple of new ones on this visit (and sampled their beers!).

Mesa Trail near Boulder, Colorado

Boulder and Colorado in general have a lot more to offer than just beer, of course. The main attraction for me were the mountains. Boulder and Denver — “the mile high city” — are already at an altitude of about 1650m, and the surrounding Rocky Mountains have numerous 4000+ meter peaks. Indeed, from my hotel it was just some two miles to a trailhead leading right to the mountains. I ended up doing most of the Mesa Trail (link to Garmin Connect), 25km round trip with 877m of height gain. The weather was absolutely perfect: sunny but not too hot. Boulder is certainly colder than North Carolina, given its elevation, but apparently they get a lot of sunny days, and the weather seems ideal really. There was still some snow left on the trails.

The Boulder trip was good academically as well, even though my talk overlapped with the Pacific APA. Because of the overlap, I didn’t get much of an audience, but it was a pleasure to see Graeme Forbes there. Of course, Kathrin Koslicki was also present, and we had a pretty good discussion. Kathrin was kind enough to entertain me all the way through my visit in fact, and I enjoyed the opportunity to take advantage of her Aristotle expertise. She is one of the very few philosophers with excellent historical knowledge combined with through knowledge of analytic metaphysics. Incidentally, if you haven’t read my commentary on her 2008 book The Structure of Objects, do check it out! (By the way the Boulder philosophy department website is one of the best I’ve seen.)

That’ll do for now. I anticipate maybe one more diary entry before I head to the West Coast, but stay tuned for a post about the recent road trip and other items, hopefully in the next week or so.

Previous entires: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6.

In Durham, they sell metaphysics by the pound. (Ninth Street)

Firstly, I’ve got another batch of talks coming up. First of them is tomorrow, Friday March 30 at Duke University (3:30pm, West Duke 202) in the colloquium series. I’ll be talking about ‘Quantification and Ontological Realism’. The talk will be followed by a reception, so stick around if you’re attending. I’m looking forward to this one, as I think I’ve got a nice paper. It’s mainly a critique of Ted Sider’s recent defence of fundamental, perfectly joint-carving quantification in his Writing the Book of the World (OUP, 2011). It’s nice to go to Durham too, since they have a “Metaphysical Shop” and all (see the photo)… Ninth Street, which is relatively close to the campus, has a very nice selection of shops and cafes.

Already on the following Wednesday, April 4, I’ll be talking at Boulder, Colorado (3:30pm, HLMS 141) with the title ‘(Neo-)Aristotelian Essentialism’. I’ll be in Boulder April 3-5.

Other than that, I haven’t got much in terms of news. I pretty much missed the whole of last week being ill with a flu. Fortunately it only hit me after the party that I organized with Elizabeth at our place. The party went well, although the turnout could’ve been better — we’re a little bit out of the way and not that many people know me yet. It was fun anyway, with a good mix of Chapel Hill faculty and graduate students. We also had someone from another college in North Carolina, whom I knew from a conference. Oh, and Peter van Inwagen showed up too, which was nice! Unfortunately I don’t have any photographic evidence of the gathering, as I was too busy entertaining guests. I particularly regret not snapping a photo of the all-vegan buffet feast that we prepared with Elizabeth. A list will have to suffice: vegan sushi, seitan-tomato-onion skewers in jerk marinade, seitan-pineapple skewers in lime marinade with lime and cilantro dip, olive-walnut rolls, green salad with vinaigrette, hummus tray with veggies, olives, gingerbread cookies, and a chocolate-cherry cake. We made everything from scratch (except the hummus), so it was a fair bit of work! But very enjoyable, and people seemed to like the food too.

Cardinals are quite common here

I ended up missing talks by Ned Markosian and Jonathan Schaffer at Duke last week because of the illness. Fortunately I managed to catch Schaffer at Chapel Hill. He gave a talk on ‘Structural Equation Models of Metaphysical Structure’ — not a very informative title. Effectively he revised his story about grounding a bit and suggested that it’s best understood as analogous to causation, or as “metaphysical causation”. I wasn’t convinced, but I won’t go into the details as I wasn’t able to follow the talk that well in my tired post-flu state. I might get my hands on a draft of this paper though (for the metaphysics reading group), in which case I’ll perhaps report in more detail.

Unsurprisingly, my running has suffered a big blow in March: I’ve missed two full weeks of training, with a half decent week in between. I’m back at it now, but still not up to full health. I’m running the Tar Heel 10-miler on April 21, so I’ve got another three weeks or so to get back into racing shape. Did I mention that I’m gaining weight from all the tasty craft beer and cooking and Elizabeth’s baking and… Well, maybe some of it is muscle from the gym work, who knows.

Deer, from our kitchen window

It’s effectively summer here now. Spring came and went with the cherry blossoms, and we even had a sweltering day of +31 Celsius not long ago. It’s nice and green everywhere. I hope to do a photography walk soon to capture some of that green stuff. The nights are warm enough to sit outside gazing the stars. Wildlife is still active too. There was some kind of an eagle on our backyard last week; I tried to photograph it but couldn’t get close enough to get a nice focus. Instead I managed to capture the Cardinal that you can see above, although it’s not the best shot — I’d really need a decent zoom lens for these birds. We also have woodpeckers visiting frequently, but they’re rather shy birds. I still haven’t gotten a better shot of the deer either, so I’m attaching one of my older shots of a couple that were hanging out around our house.

"Caribe", at Sage Café

We haven’t been out in Chapel Hill or around much recently, but we did make another trip to Sage Café — a nice vegetarian restaurant quite close to our place. You can get almost everything vegan as well. This time I remembered to bring my camera and snapped a photo of my dish, Caribe — Caribbean style black beans topped with a slice of avocado, served with rice, grilled spicy tofu & plaintains. It’s not the cheapest place, but the food is quite tasty.

I’ll report back after Boulder, I think. A friend of mine from Finland is coming to visit right after though, and we’re planning to do a week’s road trip, so I’ll be away for a bit.

Previous entires: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5.

Library of Congress

I’m back in Chapel Hill again after a trip to NYC and Washington D.C. Since these diaries are supposed to be about Chapel Hill, I won’t get into too much detail (well, you guessed it, it was mainly eating and drinking!). It was a good trip, although rather detrimental for my exercise routine. I had hoped to get in a run in the Central Park, but it just didn’t happen.

We were planning to do some touristy stuff in D.C., but in the end we couldn’t fit in very much. We took a walk around to check out the usual stuff like the monument, which was rather lame. What I wanted to see the most was the Library of Congress, which turned out to be quite interesting. We only went to the Thomas Jefferson Building, and of course we couldn’t get into the actual reading hall, but they had some exhibitions going on and it’s a very nice building anyway. We spent a long time at an exhibition about the early days in the Americas — from well before Columbus up to the early 18th century. This is something that’s not covered in very much detail in history classes in Finland, so I was curious about it. Of course, you hear all about Columbus and the devastation of the indigenous peoples, but there’s a lot of interesting detail about the early power dynamics between the settlers and the UK, as well as Spain, e.g. the fight over Cuba and Florida between the Brits and the Spanish — this was all new to me.

'SNice, NYC

Other things worth mentioning. A new coffee shop experience in NYC: ‘SNice. A great place for beer in D.C.: Churchkey (expensive, but with some 50 taps and hundreds of rare bottles, it’s worth it; they also do 4oz tasters). An all-vegan bakery (which does food as well), also in D.C.: Sticky Fingers. And finally, a place for excellent coffee in D.C.: Peregrine Espresso. We checked quite a number of places in D.C. atually, and there were a couple of other good ones, but these were the ones that stood out.

So, it was good to get out of Chapel Hill for a bit, and indeed rather nice to come back home too!

Weaver Street Market, Carrboro

Home — yes, it’s starting to feel like home here. Perhaps a bit ironically, since in just a month’s time we’ll have to move out of this lovely house we’ve got, but we’ll be around for another month after that before heading to the West Coast. Looks like it will be a rather summery two months ahead of us too, since the temperature climbed already to 28 degrees Celsius today. Already getting too hot for my taste in fact, at least for running (did a speed workout on the track today, rather exhausting!). The cherry blossoms are blooming, baby rabbits are running about, Canada geese are making noise… I’ll try to get out for a photo shoot some time soon to capture some of this. In the meanwhile, I’m attaching some evidence of what is getting to be a very nice working routine: having a coffee and brunch at one of the nice local coffee shops. I received a tip for a place that’s a bit out of the way in Carrboro, the Looking Glass Cafe. In fact, we were working there just today; they’ve got a nice outdoor space. Weaver Street Market and the Open Eye Cafe, which I’ve mentioned before, are other regular spots.

Working with Elizabeth at the Looking Glass Cafe, Carrboro

Talking about coffee, I seem to now be completely converted from a devout tea drinker into a coffee aficionado — this is largely Elizabeth’s influence, but it also has something to do with the fact that it’s difficult to get decent tea here, whereas quality (and very good quality!) coffee is readily available. There are numerous good coffee roasteries in the area, and by now we’ve sampled enough of them to make a reasonable assessment about their quality. A list of the ones we’ve tried (meaning that we’ve bought at least a half a pound of one or more of their whole beans to brew at home) in my order of preference follows:

1. Counter Culture Coffee (Durham)
2. Carrboro Coffee Company (Roasted at the Open Eye in Carrboro)
3. Jessee’s Coffee and Bar (Carrboro)
4. Bean Trader’s Coffee (Durham and Chapel Hill)
5. Kind Coffee
6. Joe Van Gogh (Hillsborough and Durham)
7. Larry’s Beans (Raleigh)

It seems that Jessee’s roasts beans on location, but once we got the Kind Coffee beans from there — I’ve listed them as separate although I’m not quite sure what the deal is. Both were pretty good anyway. Counter Culture Coffee seems to be pretty much the good coffee anywhere on the East Coast, as even Peregrine Espresso and Sticky Fingers in D.C. were using their beans! Indeed, it’s good stuff. Carrboro Coffee Company has never disappointed either — I think we’ve gone through four different bags of beans from them. Some beans that we’ve gotten from Bean Trader’s and Larry’s Beans have been a bit burnt tasting (we tend to go for the darkest roast), although still quite drinkable. In general, beans from Sumatra by any roastery have been excellent.

So much for coffee. In terms of work, I’m chipping away at a paper on quantification and realism, as I’m giving a talk on the topic at Duke in two weeks. More on that when I get deeper into it. I should also start working on my talk at Boulder in early April… But right now I’m looking forward to another Metaphysics Reading Group meeting tomorrow, and a party which we’re putting together with Elizabeth at our house on Friday. More news probably some time next week!

Previous entires: #1, #2, #3.

Keeping busy here! We had a car for the weekend, mainly to get to the The North Carolina Philosophical Society Meeting with the South Carolina Society for Philosophy at Elon University, where I gave a talk on quantification and ontological realism. Elon is a mere 40min drive from Chapel Hill, but the intercity connections here on public transportation are not very good, so the only way to get there was by car. No matter, we made use of the car on Sunday as well, heading to the Uwharrie National Forest, about 100 miles from Chapel Hill.

Elon University Campus

Let me report briefly on the conference to begin with. The host organization, Elon University, is rather small — the town of Elon itself is also tiny, virtually just a suburb of Burlington, which is not a huge city itself. The university is basically the whole town, and there’s virtually nothing there. The campus does look nice enough, but we figured that it was a bit of a mistake to have booked a hotel in the area since there was nothing to do. Oh well, it was nice enough to get away from Chapel Hill for a night. I ended up skipping quite a few sessions of the conference because I was there with Elizabeth (I don’t drive, so I needed her anyway), but there weren’t that many talks that I was interested in to begin with. It was very low key, even though there were seven or eight parallel sessions and hence quite a few talks.

My talk at Elon, featuring some Prezi action

I was on at the very end of the first day at the conference. I had a reasonable audience of 10-15 people; none of the talks that I attended had much larger audiences. I was surprised to see that very few people had bothered to prepare slides of any kind, so my lively Prezi presentation did its job quite well, and there was a decent discussion afterwards. The slots were mere 40min though, including discussion, so I couldn’t say quite as much as I would’ve wanted to. The goal of the talk was really just to test a few ideas that emerged when reading Ted Sider’s new book, Writing the Book of the World. Basically I have issues about his claim that defending the fundamentality of quantification is the best way to argue against ontological deflationism. To my mind, the focus on quantificational questions is misplaced: the question of quantification is independent of the question of realism. So, I’m arguing that Sider has not given us very good reasons to think that quantification carves at the joints, or that anything carves at the joints perfectly — it seems central to his project to identify some examples of perfect joint-carving (Sider suggests that, in addition to quantification, things like electron and mass are likely candidates). Well, you can check out my Prezi slides, linked above, if you’re interested, but I will write much more about this in the coming month, since I’m giving a full talk on the topic of ‘Quantification and Realism’ at the Duke University colloquium on March 30.

Talking about talks, I’ve updated the list of my talks this spring/summer. Note that there is a new addition, coming up already this Thursday, March 1 (4pm), at UNC Greensboro. My topic there is ‘The Epistemology of Essence’ — virtually the same talk that I gave in Chapel Hill recently, and which I will give again at the Kripke Center in CUNY, New York on Monday, March 5. This is a major theme in my research, so I don’t mind the repetition; the topic is very much a neglected one and I’d like to make as many people as possible aware about the problematics.

Reading at home on a snowy day.

By the way, we got some snow here last week! It was rather surprising, given that we’ve already had some days with +23 Celsius, but the difference between day and night temperatures here can be.. well, like night and day! The snow did swiftly melt the next day though.

In addition to my own talks, there are some interesting talks coming up in Chapel Hill and Duke. Philip Kitcher is visiting here at the moment and giving a total of five talks in three days! His main event is the Michael Polanyi Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Natural Science. I’m quite busy with a number of things at the moment, so I might not be able to catch very many of Kitcher’s talks, but I hope to make it at least to his talk on mathematical truth at Duke on Wednesday.

The Metaphysics Reading Group meets at the Departmental Library

We’ve also had another meeting of the metaphysics reading group. It was pretty heavy this time, as we read Peter van Inwagen’s draft on ontological levels and fundamentality, with Peter himself as well as Bob Adams attending. It was a pleasure to see these two prominent philosophers debating, although I would’ve had a lot to say about the topic myself as well! Anyway, the metaphysics reading group has turned out to be an excellent venue for informal discussion with some good metaphysicians.

Uwharrie National Forest

Well, that’s a lot of work related stuff, but as I mentioned, we did make a trip to the Uwharrie National Forest for some trail running as well. Since we were going to have the car for the weekend anyway, we decided to check out one of the several National Parks in North Carolina. It looked like there would be a nice ~30km loop that should be runnable, so we set off to do that as our long run of the week. The day turned out to be nice and sunny, although not very warm — perfect for running though. The trail itself was well marked and mostly very good to run on. There aren’t many mountains in the state, but the landscape was rolling and my Garmin did report a total height gain of 856m, which is probably about right. In the end the trail wasn’t that interesting, as the wintry yet snowless terrain got a bit repetitive and there was a distinct absence of wildlife (at least compared to what we see out of our kitchen window!), but there were some very pretty sections. It was a nice day out and we could certainly feel the effect of the trail the next day. Total running time was just under four hours, so the pace was easy but not bad for rolling trails.

Trail running in Uwharrie National Forest

After the trail run we drove to the capital of the state, Raleigh, roughly 100 miles from the forest. It’s not very far from Chapel Hill, but, once again, not very easily accessed with public transportation. It was about time to check the city out though, as there does seem to be a number of interesting restaurants, cafés, and bars there. We only had time to check out one place this time though, namely The Remedy Diner, which turned out to be quite pleasant. There’s a nice selection of vegan and vegetarian dishes well marked on the menu, and they also do some interesting cocktails (not that we tried any). I had some vegan meatballs with squash “spaghetti”, topped off with Daiya shreds; Elizabeth had a sub with the same vegan meatballs. They also claim to have a number of vegan desserts, but they were out of all but one, a sopapilla cheesecake, which we had (and enjoyed, although the portion was rather small). Anyway, it was a nice meal after the run, although perhaps nothing mind-blowing, especially given the fact that the place wasn’t exactly cheap. I think we’ll make another trip to Raleigh at some point, hopefully spending a night there as well.

Ok, that’s probably enough stuff to digest for a few days; I’ll report back after my talk at Greensboro. Soon after that, on Sunday, we’re heading to New York (11h train trip!), where we’ll be for three nights. We’ll take the train back in two stages, stopping by at Washington D.C. for two nights (just touristy things there), and then heading back to Chapel Hill on Friday.