Out and about

The Easter term has just started and so I am getting ready for the steady stream of 'practice exam answers' that I spend most of the next few weeks marking before I have to mark the real exam answers in late May/early June.  The term is mostly quite pleasant.  I've finished my lecturing already so the teaching is all supervisions (though there are still the usual Faculty meetings to endure).

And I've come back refreshed from a lovely but brief visit to Iceland.  I gave a seminar and a lecture (at the kind invitation of a colleague there) and we all then got to spend a few days looking around Reykjavik and the immediate area.  Here is one of those 'panorama' photos of the harbour.

It's a beautiful place.

For the rest, in no particular order in the next couple of week I have to:

... work out what I think about a bit of Ps. Aristotle MXG for our Mayweek seminar.  (It would help if the text were more stable and were not 75% composed of parts of the verb to be and assorted definite articles...)

... read R. Jay Wallace's The View from Here.  I've decided that 'regret' (metameleia) in ancient philosophy is something I want to think more about and, in particular, whether and why a fully virtuous person might ever come to regret some past action or some past decision.  I'm also interested in a more radical kind of regret: 'existential regret', thinking that it would have been better never to have been born.  This looks to be a great place to begin.

... think a bit about a possible research project I might be hatching with another colleague here in Cambridge.  We all have to have a project in the pipeline these days, and this idea is at least something that promises to be challenging and interesting.

... prepare a short lecture for the Oxford-Cambridge Classics Open Day for VI formers (2 May).  I think Plato's Protagoras is a set text for A level Greek at the moment but students only read a small chunk of it.  The plan is to try to say something that is both relevant to that bit they have to study and also broadens the focus into other parts of the dialogue and into interesting philosophical arguments.