Today Crispin Wright gave a talk on higher order vagueness. Since I know the readers of this blog are not too well-versed in semantics or fuzzy logic (nor am I, honestly) I will gloss over the content of his talk and say merely that it was very interesting. I wasn't able to understand it completely, but that's probably all right - I understood more than at last year's logic lecture at Smith, where I understood more than the previous year, and so on. In other words, I'm learning, and though progress is slow, I can tell it's happening. I'm getting there.
Afterwards there was a brief reception, and one of the professors had brought a lovely selection of noshes - including baklava, apple cider, dates stuffed with cheese, and fresh guacamole. Very delicious. The Horse tried to use baklava as props to show us where the dinner afterwards was to be held, but it made little sense to me and when the time came we just all walked over together.
The dinner was at a very nice Afghani restaurant I'd never been to before. I'd never had Afghani food, either, so it was a novel experience. The emphasis on cilantro and dill was not to my liking, but the Horse gave me some of his Cornish game hen, which was delicious, and we had a very nice baba ganouj and I had some nice vegetable dumplings.
The Horse was there, and his wife JW (who is my logic teacher and mentor), and my philosophy of language teacher GE, and two other grad students: my roommate K and a boy called Tim who is, K and I always think, very standard. The bulk of the dinner-table talk was philosophical - in particular, philosophy of logic. I was fascinated and tried desperately to hang on. There were some other topics where I was able to contribute more conversationally; I did my best to represent, as I doubt we were invited along to sit mutely. The Horse was very amusing as usual, and I utterly adore JW and GE, and Crispin Wright was awfully smart and personable. It was all in all a wonderful dinner from soup to nuts, and the sort of thing that makes me so happy I'm in academia. There will be many such dinners in my life.
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2 comments:
I am so happy that you are happy. You seem to be having a feast for the mind AND the body in most of your posts. And maybe even some food for the soul, too.
Wonderful!
speaking of food, that baked lentil and cheese casserole was pretty much the same as the one in "More With Less," with a few exceptions.
1. It called for fresh tomatoes. (we didn't have any, so I used canned anyway.)
2. It called for a bay leaf- does the More With Less have that? anyway, they said to remove it at one point, but I forgot and almost choked on it later. not fun.
But it did require marjoram, and we still didn't have any. I guess the joke's on me.
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