calling it a night

That was a great conference dinner, which I pretended was a birthday dinner. And it wasn’t all pretense– they actually sang me the “Happy Birthday” song, and the neighboring table joined in as well. The dinner was at the Cherwell Boathouse in a fairly remote portion of Oxford. I’d never been anywhere close to that area before; it was quite a walk.

Good three-course meal with sufficient vegetarian options. Carrot salad, followed by linguine of some sort, followed by a peanut butter/caramel brulée for dessert.

I think this was a very good plan for a conference. Bring in lots of people from multiple fields with a loose shared interest (objects, in this case). But we have to communicate with each other, so we’re all expelled from our terminological comfort zones. And we’re all being confronted with strange objects, which means that we can’t superimpose any pre-conceptions upon them but must improvise in the face of the real. It ends up being quite a brain workout. All of the people are very nice as well, so it’s a pleasure to spend time in this group.

It is not a virtue when philosophy is unable to communicate with any other disciplines. This leads only to a thin layer of arrogance covering massive strata of intellectual decadence concealed by over-professionalized precision.