Well, I am currently (when I finish this post) working in harried fashion to finish writing an academic paper for publication that I promised myself that I would have finished this week. The prospects are not favorable at the moment. I'm trying to get two research projects into publication form before H and I go on vacation in June for a week. It's going to require some late nights.
Jax successfully passed his tapeworm only about 6 hrs after I gave him the 2-pill treatment. Fascinating stuff. I looked for the scolex in the stool, but confess that I gave up after a few minutes of digging with a stick. Thankfully, Herr Worm was short enough not to cause any great difficulties in being passed. I confess that I had thought of the scenario of my poor dog running around with an incompletely passed tapeworm trailing him. My only plan involved needle-nosed pliers. Enough of that.
In other news, some friends and I met last night as the inaugural meeting of a weekly discussion group on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy. I'm calling it the Anti-Metaphysical Club. For you historians, there's a direct allusion to the Metaphysical Club from the late 19th century which included William James and C.S. Peirce among others. The allusion is intentional, if for no other reasons than these two: 1.) Wittgenstein has an "anti-metaphysical" air about his work, and 2.) William James is the most alluded to philosopher in Wittgenstein's work. As the folks involved in the study are all theological types, we're mostly interested in how Wittgenstein has been used, or should be used, in doing theology (incidentally, we want to tackle the question of whether Wittgenstein presents a framework that can be "used" at all). This includes his influence on Stanley Hauerwas and also perhaps A. MacIntyre, the recently trendy Wittgensteinian-Thomism (a la Fergus Kerr and others), and the possibility of reading Barth with the aid of Wittgenstein.
I am also reading An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears which is compelling though I've only just begun (approx. pg. 115 of a possible 725). Should prove to be a fantastic vacation read, and might be the first to rival my enjoyment of Cryptonomicon. Also on the "soon to read" bookshelf at the moment is the second volume of Jean-Pierre Torrell's biography of Thomas Aquinas (which I started from shear impatience but have not devoted full attention to as yet), about half a dozen books on the Gospel according to Luke, mostly focusing on wealth and poverty (more posts about this later), and Reasoning About Uncertainty by Halpern which is a semi-technical volume (semi-technical because it's definitely technical but not quite a textbook, but certainly not a popular book either) about how to deal with uncertainty and is I guess best described as being broadly about the theory of plausible reasoning (the theory of probability is insufficient to cover the entire range of plausibility structures). The latter feeds my fascination with formal approaches to uncertainty and probability.
So that's what's going on with the bookshelf. In more embodied activities: We're still training Jax, who is now going through a singularly frustrating bout of adolescent-ism. I've also just installed Linux on my laptop and am looking forward to exploring that world (maybe not a very embodied activity...). Having done two days ago a nice 18 mi out-and-back with a very nice hill at the half way, I am happy to report that I'm back on my bike . I'm really out of shape. But to improve on physical conditioning I'm biking, running, and playing tennis (with sprints between games). If I can just convince H to enjoy one of those activities I'll be very happy. No luck yet.
There's more going on, like breakfast with the homeless guys etc., but that's probably best in another post.
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