Brewery: Brouwerij van Honsebrouck (Belgium)
Beer: St. Louis Kriek, 4.0% ABV, 250ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Sugar, Barley Malt, Wheat, Cherries (15%)
Style: Lambic (Kriek)
Rating: 3/5
Probably Vegan Friendly

St. Louis Kriek

Appearance
Dark ruby red, almost brown.

Aroma
Sweet spices, cherries, almond pits

Taste
Sweet, maybe too much so. The gueuze base gives the beer a sour kick though, but it is rather well covered by the cherries and the sweetness. Good for someone who doesn’t like the pure lambic taste so much, but wants an authentic kriek. I do like the amaretto-like, almond pit flavour, although it’s more distinctive in the aroma.

Overall
I haven’t been drinking many lambics recently, but it is a type of beer that I quite like. Lambic style beers are made with spontaneous fermentation, i.e. there is no added yeast but rather just the fermentation that occurs naturally with wild yeast and bacteria when the container is left open. This gives the beer a rather sour natural taste, more like a dry cider than a beer on the face of it. However, beers such the kriek are in fact refermented, and this particular kriek is made by maturing morello cherry pulp for at least six months in the gueuze base, which itself a blend of matured lambics. You can get lambics with a range of fruity flavours, such as rasberries and peaches. Personally I prefer gueuze or other lambics without fruit, but the kriek is a classic, and quite fitting for winter time. I’ve had this one before in fact, and I to expect excessive sweetness. Sadly my favourite lambics, including my favourite kriek, which come from Cantillon, are not quite so readily available, although you can buy them at a couple of pubs in Finland.

I’ve mentioned my work on the epistemology of essence several times, and I gave a talk with that title at NYU already last spring. Since then I’ve been slowly chipping away at the draft that I had, with the help of a number comments I’ve gotten (thanks a lot for those everyone, I’ll make sure to mention you when the paper finds a home). Anyway, the draft has inflated into a near 12.000 word essay; and there’s a lot more that I’d like to say about the topic! I’m giving a talk here at Chapel Hill in just ten days with the same title, so hopefully something useful will come out of that too, but I think that the current draft is not too bad, and I’m about to start shopping around with it. Any reactions are of course more than welcome. The draft is available here.

The starting point of this paper is the Aristotelian idea that essence is ontologically prior to modality. This has been popularized by Kit Fine in particular, but the view has been defended by E. J. Lowe, David S. Oderberg, and Kathrin Koslicki as well, among others. In the paper I try to shed some light on the neglected topic of the epistemology of essence understood in the Aristotelian fashion, giving a survey of the options that have been defended — or hinted towards — in the literature, as well as trying to see whether there are some options that have not been researched at all.

I identify for major options, listed in the table below. Central to my discussion is the apparent link between modality and essence — the classic, ‘modalist’ Kripke-Putnam picture suggesting that the latter should be analysed in terms of the former. I think it’s obvious that there is a link between the two, as even in the Aristotelian tradition necessity is considered to be a necessary [sic] criterion for essentiality, or, perhaps better: essentiality entails necessity, even though necessity does not entail essentiality. So, it is key to explicate the relationship between essence and modality.

The two decisions that determine the options are whether essence is epistemologically prior to modality, and whether our access to it is a posteriori or a priori. This does not rule out a hybrid view, but I’m mostly interested in unitary accounts in this paper. So, the important thing to see is that even though essence is ontologically prior to modality, this does not entail that the epistemic order of explanation has to be the same. In fact, maintaining that modality is epistemically prior to essence is an option that has been almost entirely neglected amongst those who accept Fine’s reduction of metaphysical modality to essence (and the Aristotelian picture of essence).

After a detailed discussion of Lowe’s, Oderberg’s, and Fine’s views on essence, and placing them in the appropriate cells of the above table, I conclude by defending my own view, which is that the epistemic route to essence is via our a priori access to metaphysical modality. Go ahead and read the full paper! I’ll probably also post a link to my slides after the forthcoming talk at Chapel Hill.

An interesting conference at my alma mater:

Experience, Action and the Metaphysics of Time
Durham University, 26th June 2012
Keynote speakers:
Robin Le Poidevin (Leeds)
Barry Dainton (Liverpool)
David Cockburn (University of Wales, Trinity Saint David)

The debate between proponents of the A-theory and the B-theory is a familiar one, conducted across a range of metaphysical issues (truthmakers, propositions, change). Our everyday experiences, such as of perceiving, acting, and undergoing emotions, clearly involve both a temporal dimension and an awareness of time. But do the different kinds of experience support either metaphysical theory of time?
For instance, for an action to be rational, it often requires a tensed awareness of certain facts (that the meeting is about to start now; that I am late for it). Many emotions seem to have a temporal orientation, in that they are only appropriate as regards events in the past (grief) or future (fear). Our perception of things and events, as opposed to imagining or remembering them, is often thought to have a present-tensed aspect. And the flowing of experiences through time itself seems to require a sense of what is happening at this present moment.
In each of these cases it can be asked if this experience can only be explained by appeal to irreducibly tensed facts, or if it can be accounted for by a tenseless theory. Although these issues have been previously discussed, the matter remains unsettled and we believe it deserves renewed consideration in light of advances in the theories of action, emotion, perception and the self (for example, the increased recognition of the variety of ways in which an emotion can be taken to be appropriate or not).
We are looking for papers in any of the above areas, or on any topics which relate to the overall conference theme, especially those that recognise how advances made in other areas of philosophy can inform the metaphysics of time or vice versa.

Papers will be 30 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of up to 500 words to either Olley Pearson (f.o.c.pearson@durham.ac.uk) or Donnchadh O’Conaill (donnchadh.o’conaill@durham.ac.uk ) by March 16th 2012. Decisions on speakers will be made within two weeks of this date.

Well, you may have thought that food posts and recipes on this blog were a short-lived experiment, but, alas, you were wrong! The lack of dedicated food posts is not so much because I haven’t been cooking (or eating out in places worth mentioning), rather, I’ve been quite busy with just settling in to North Carolina, and getting used to my new kitchen! Also, I’m now doing virtually all of my cooking together with Elizabeth, so I feel like I need to give her some credit as well. This is true of the dish of the title as well.

Before I get into the recipe, let me say that it’s a real pleasure cooking with someone, especially if that someone knows what she’s doing. This way you may end up combining flavours in a way that wouldn’t have occurred to either one of the ‘chefs’ individually. Anyway, on to food!

Smoked Tofu with Asparagus & Collard Greens

Ingredients
300g of (Smoked) Tofu
20 Stalks of Fresh Asparagus
1 Yellow Onion
Small Bunch of Collard Greens
1 Cup of Quinoa
Some Vinegar and Oil for a Vinaigrette

Serves two. The Collard Greens were all Elizabeth, but basically they were just sautéed with some onion in olive oil, soy sauce, ground allspice, and ground cumin. And yes, that’s a cup of quinoa — I’m learning to live with US measures, but I’m mixing these up just to confuse you…

Cooking
Time required: ~45min
-Heat oven to 375 Fahrenheit or about 200 Celsius.
-Heat some water for the quinoa, or you can use a rice cooker; put quinoa in, it should take about 15min.
-Prepare two oven dishes lightly rubbed with olive oil for the smoked tofu and the asparagus; put them in the oven when it’s warm and bake for ~30min.
-In the meanwhile, chop the onion and the collard greens, and sautée with your selection of spices.
-Prepare the vinaigrette: we a used 50/50 mix of walnut oil and a blueberry infused balsamic vinegar.
-Serve the collard greens as a side, and the asparagus on a bed of quinoa, with the vinaigrette drizzled on top.

Smoked Tofu with Asparagus & Collard Greens Closeup

I actually wanted to steam the asparagus rather than bake it in the oven, but we’re lacking equipment for steaming at the moment; still, baking it works ok as well. The smoked tofu we used came in two blocks, and we just baked them as they came; the end result was a nice puffed piece of tofu with a crunchy outer layer and soft insides.

The sautéed collard greens were tasty and added a salty yet sweet spiciness. I also liked how the quinoa soaked up the vinaigrette, and it certainly complemented the asparagus nicely. The funky vinaigrette of walnut oil and blueberry balsamic vinegar turned out to be a success.

Brewery: Fuller’s (England)
Beer: Old Winter Ale, 5.3% ABV, 500ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Crystal Malts, Target, Challenger, and Northdown Hops
Style: Winter Ale/Bitter
Rating: 4/5
Vegan Friendly

Fuller's Old Winter Ale

Appearance
Copper/amber. Pours a moderately thick head.

Aroma
Caramel sweetness, malt, toffee.

Taste
Starts as a typical English Bitter, but a toffee-like sweetness overwhelms quickly. Tastes like an English winter by the fireplace! There’s plenty of hops lingering about too, the mixture of different hops creates a nice balance.

Overall
I’ve missed beers like this, I tended to drink much more of pretty standard English bitters when I lived in the UK, but much less so since I moved back to Finland (and in the US), for obvious reasons. Not that this is a standard bitter; it has a more complex hops profile and the crystal malts create a lot of sweetness, appropriate for a Winter/Christmas Ale.

It took me a full month before I got around to writing this first diary entry of my visit to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I’ll compensate by making it excessively long…

Caldwell Hall -- the Philosophy Department

I’ve covered the background of my visit in an earlier post, but perhaps a brief recap is in order. I’m here in Chapel Hill for the whole spring semester as a Visiting Scholar, in the remit of my postdoc project back in Helsinki. The departmental sponsor of my visit is L. A. Paul, but I do also hope to take advantage of Thomas Hofweber‘s and Marc Lange‘s presence in particular, in addition to the rest of the excellent faculty and what seems like a good bunch of grad students as well. In fact, Thomas and myself have already been involved in a joint project of sorts, more about that in due course.

The campus is quite nice, and dominates Chapel Hill. The philosophy department is located in Caldwell Hall, which is a pretty building. After some curious issues with missing and broken keys, I’ve finally also gained access to my office. It’s tiny, noisy, extremely hot, inconveniently located, and I share it with two other people (one of them is never there though), but it’s more than NYU provided for me during my visit there, so I’ll take it. In fact, the departmental library is a much nicer space, so I may end up working there at times. In general I’m quite happy working at home, but I guess the idea of visiting another department makes more sense if you actually pop in every once in a while! Besides, the internet at our house is awful.

Open Eye Cafe

Chapel Hill is rather tiny, but because the University is big, there are some decent services available. I may do a more detailed post about the restaurants, cafes etc. in the area later on, but I’ve already found a favourite coffee shop, The Open Eye Cafe in Carrboro, and eaten at the two veggie restaurants in the area, Butternut Squash and Sage. There are also a couple of breweries in the area, so eventually you can expect to see reviews of some local brews on the blog. Anyway, the student crowd guarantees at least a minimal selection of alternative services, and in general it’s not a problem to find good produce and vegan groceries; one of the best places, albeit very expensive, is the local Co-Op, Weaver Street Market, also in Carrboro.

The student population also means that there are some cultural events of interest in the area. So far we’ve seen a puppet show about burning prisons by the local anarchist cell (yes, really) at a curious book shop called Internationalist Books, and a student production of ‘A Diary of Somebody’, based on the life of Joe Orton (it wasn’t bad). By the way, just opposite Internationalist Books, on the other side of the street, there is a fancy private club called The Crunkleton, which we joined the other day. It probably stands for everything that the anarchists oppose, but it may be the only place in Chapel Hill to get decent booze — their whisky selection at least is commendable. I had an interesting brew there, the Barrel Aged Charkoota Rye, a smoked Dobblebock by New Holland Brewing Co. Anyway, I like to think that I’m in the middle of the road…

This is where we live..

I haven’t had the opportunity to explore the nearby cities yet, but Durham at least is so close by that I should do so soon. However, even though there is one aspect of the public transportation here that is absolutely great — namely it being completely free of charge — the hours of operation are certainly less than ideal. It’s virtually impossible to go out to Durham on a weekend night without a car, for instance. So, I can’t say much about North Carolina in general, but I can tell you that I like the climate: most days the temperature gets above 10 degrees Celsius, and it has already gotten up to about 21 degrees on a few days. This means that I can run in shorts in the middle of winter! The nights can be cold though, we do get freezing temperatures as well. Still, it looks extremely unlikely that I would see any snow this winter. It’s also sunny most of the time; I think it has rained maybe on four or five of the 30 days I’ve spent here.

..and here are some of my favourite things about it: Elizabeth, the library, and the fireplace.

I was fortunate enough to secure myself and Elizabeth — who is with me here in Chapel Hill for the duration of my visit — a lovely house until mid-April. It’s located a few miles north of the town, so we have to commute to town by bike, but the luxury of living in a massive 3000 square feet (or 278 square metre) detached house with two fire places, a library, and a workout room with a treadmill in the middle of some nice woods more than makes up for it. As you can see, I’ve attached a couple of photos of the house and its surroundings to this post. The only downside besides the slow internet is that it’s not cheap to heat the house up, which is why we keep it rather (=too) cool. This probably becomes a positive thing once the nights get warmer, but at the moment it’s not ideal. Incidentally, I also look forward to taking advantage of the numerous terraces that we have once it gets warmer. In the meanwhile, the fireplace in the library will probably see frequent use.

Our backyard on one of the very few grey days.

One last thing to mention about the surroundings are the Carolina North Forest and Duke Forest, which are both accessible from our house, although the latter is a bit far to get to without a bike. We do most of our running in the Carolina North Forest, which has a nice selection of trails, some are almost cross-country, but some are easy enough. I’ve got a regular 17km route that I tend to do. At the moment the woods are quite bare, but I expect that things will bloom early on here, so the woods should get nice and green soon enough. I hope to post some photos from the trails once I get around with my camera. In terms of wildlife, we get LOTS of squirrels (we virtually live with them), but also a lot of deer, who seem to be stupidly brave (and get hit by cars frequently, it seems). I haven’t captured any of them with my camera yet, but will post evidence as soon as I do.

Well, that about sums it up in terms of my living situation here. I do hope to post the next instalment somewhat sooner, hopefully with some more philosophical material as well. I am actually getting some work done too, and there is a metaphysics reading group going on. In two weeks’ time I’ll give a talk at the department, and I plan to post something here after that at latest!

2011 was full of ups and downs in terms of running. I had a solid winter of base building behind me, and I was in pretty good shape when I started my visit in New York in the beginning of March. At that point I really needed just some race sharpening, and it was easy to smash my previous PBs: I ran a 1:25:15 half marathon at 13.1 New York, just 15sec shy of my season’s target, and only eight days later I recorded my current 10k PB of 37:41 at the Scotland Run, taking care of my season’s target of sub 38min.

The rest of the summer was spent mostly on getting to marathon shape for Helsinki City Marathon in August, and ultimately Amsterdam Marathon in October, but I seemed to have lost my speed as I just couldn’t improve on the the half marathon and 10k times that I did in April. My confidence was low, and my training suffered from constant travelling and flu viruses. Still, I surprised myself by running 3:02:31 in Amsterdam, well below my target of 3:10h for the season. My total running mileage was also well above target (2000 miles), being 2316 miles for 2011.

I didn’t really have a chance to improve my 5k PB (18:46), even though I’ve recorded at least three faster 5k times since then in 10k races and in training. There just weren’t any fast 5k races at an appropriate time. 5k is a low priority for me anyway though.

UNC-Chapel Hill track

After Amsterdam I was keen to get back into base building and get some good mileage in, but I suffered from illness and some persistent niggles brought on by the intensive marathon, so I didn’t get nearly as many miles in as I was hoping. 2012 started with some more intense travelling and yet another flu virus, but in the last two weeks of January I have finally gotten back into proper training, and it looks as if I’ve somehow managed to find some speed in my legs too. The climate in North Carolina, where I’ve been since the beginning of 2012, is ideal for running — I can run in shorts in the middle of the winter! The University also has a nice track where I’ve been doing some speed work. Well, it will be put to test very soon, as I’m running Kappa Delta Shamrock ‘n’ Run 5K right here in Chapel Hill in just a week’s time. I’ve also signed up to my first ever 10-miler, the Tar Heel 10-miler, which is in April, also in Chapel Hill.

Right now I’m feeling great, and looking forward to clocking ~60-70 mile weeks with some quality speed work thrown in. I’m also biking up to 50 miles per week (commuting to town), and doing 2-3 gym sessions per week. I haven’t been swimming here yet, but I’d hope to be able to fit in a weekly swimming session too if I can. I just hope that I can stay healthy — I have a tendency to push my training a bit too far when I’m feeling good…

I’m doing a lot of trail running at the moment, since the best places to run near where I live are all trails (I hope to post some photos of those trails soon). I love it, but I’m concerned that my legs will forget how it feels to run long distances on asphalt. I do think that the trails are great for strengthening leg muscles though, and I suspect that the sudden increase in speed that I’ve encountered is largely due to the trails.

I’ve finally updated my running goals for 2012, but let me state them here for everyone to see as well:

5km: <17:30min
10km: <36min
Half Marathon: <80min
Marathon: <2:55:00
Mileage: 2500+ miles, or 4023+ km

The marathon is my priority, and I’ve already signed up for the fast Berlin marathon in the end of September. I hope to do a marathon around May or June as well though, just to see how I’m doing. The 10k and the half marathon targets look a bit tough to me at the moment, but if I can keep training at the level I’m doing now, then I’m optimistic. Really I’d be more than happy if I can just do a sub 3h marathon this year though, everything else is extra!

Brewery: Stallhagen (Finland)
Beer: Winter Porter (an alias for ‘Baltic Porter’), 7.0% ABV, 500ml bottle
Listed Ingredients: Water, Malted Barley, Hops, Yeast.
Style: Porter
Rating: 3/5
Probably Vegan Friendly

Stallhagen Winter Porter

Appearance
Black, pours a nice head of medium thickness.

Aroma
Roasted malt, caramel, hint of licorice and woodsmoke.

Taste
Medium dry, no nonsense porter. Maltyness hints you in the aftertaste, the beer is actually surprisingly light when you first sip it. A fairly standard porter with an emphasis on roasted malt.

Overall
Porter is perhaps my favourite style of beer, and I’m always keen to try new ones. Having tried so many of them, my criteria is quite strict, so although this could easily be rated 4/5 being a rather nice beer, I’ve dropped one mark because I’ve had so many excellent porters. I feel like this one might be a bit too light if it weren’t for the reasonably high ABV — it supports the characteristics of the beer. The aroma is actually excellent, and I was expecting a very good beer from that. The taste does not disappoint, but it’s not as deep or developed as the aroma might suggest. I’ve recently had another Stallhagen beer, their Julbok, which I reviewed earlier. I prefer the Porter, although they’re both decent.

Thomas Müller opening the workshop

I was recently in the Netherlands (again!) for the Kickoff Workshop of the ERC funded Indeterminism Ltd. project’s Kickoff Workshop, organized by Thomas Müller and Jesse Mulder. Looking at the list of invited speakers, which, in addition to myself, included philosophers of science, a physicist, people working on decisions theories and philosophy of action etc., you might think that it was a rather peculiar event. However, the setup of the project is interdisciplinary, and I take it that the idea of the workshop was to bounce ideas around with people from different backgrounds. I’d say that this was a success in the end, as we had some lively, interesting discussions; I certainly learned a lot about the whole debate surrounding libertarian accounts of free will. Of course, I work on metaphysics, so I’m by no means an expert on all aspects of this debate, but I do find it very interesting.

My Q&A session (thanks to Jesse Mulder for the photo)

My own talk was called ‘On the Very Idea of Substance Causation’. You can find my slides and the abstract on the workshop website. Basically I was looking into Lowe’s account of substance causation in particular, which takes all causation to be substance causation. I ventured to suggest that a proponent of substance causation might have to follow Lowe in being a substance dualist as well. I was a little bit jetlagged having flown over from the US, so my presentation was perhaps a little sloppy (I was also the first speaker), but the idea seemed to get across well enough, since there was a good discussion afterwards. I have to admit though that the postdocs and PhD students in the project know this area much better than I do (and had some interesting insights about this).

A fancy clock at the venue

I did find it a bit difficult to follow some of the talks, given that I knew very little of the background literature. Having talked to Alexander Reutlinger, who gave a talk entitled ‘Interventionist Theories of Causation and Free Will’, but who doesn’t really specialize on this stuff either, it seems that this feeling may have been shared by others as well. However, the Q&A sessions were all good, and I feel that I got a decent understanding of the overall area.

Post-workshop drinks

I didn’t know any of the other speakers from before, with the exception of Alexander, but I had visited Utrecht before in October 2011, when I met some members of the research group. Utrecht is a rather nice city and it was great to meet some new people, as well as a couple of old acquaintances. My thanks to Thomas Müller and the whole research group for putting together a very nice workshop! It seems to me that The Netherlands is quickly becoming an important centre for philosophy in Europe, so I look forward to future events there. The project as a whole looks promising and I will keep an eye on their future events — there’s another four years left in the project. Make sure to check out Thomas Müller’s sister project as well, called ‘What is really possible?‘ — that one is in fact closer to my own research interests.

Some more photos that I took are available at my gallery.

This is a paper which I wrote with my former colleague at Durham, Donnchadh O’Conaill. I’ve mentioned it here before, but I thought I’d advertise it again since it’s now available in print! The paper is a chapter in a Palgrave-Macmillan volume edited by Philip Goff. The volume is in the Philosophers in Depth series and it’s called Spinoza on Monism. You can get the volume from Amazon.co.uk, among other places.

Philip Goff: Spinoza on Monism

Our paper, called ‘On the Common Sense Argument for Monism’, is mainly a reply to Schaffer’s recent paper in defence of priority monism, which is also reprinted in this volume. We mainly take issue with one particular argument, the common sense argument, which Russell originally put forward in favour of pluralism, but which Schaffer turns on its head. We argue that the common sense argument for pluralism stands its ground. You can download the penultimate version of our paper here.

The list of contributors is impressive, including E. J. Lowe, John Heil, Jonathan Schaffer, and so on. The first part concerns monism in contemporary metaphysics, which is what our paper is about, and the second part is more historical, and more closely related to Spinoza. Here is the full list of contents:

PART I: MONISM IN CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS
Monism: The Priority of the Whole; J.Schaffer
Existence Monism Trumps Priority Monism; T.Horgan & M.Potr?
Why the World has Parts: Reply to Horgan and Potr?; J.Schaffer
Against Monism; E.J.Lowe
There Is More Than One Thing; P.Goff
The World as We Know It; R.Healey
On the Common Sense Argument for Monism; D.O’Conaill & T.E.Tahko
Substances Stressed; J.Heil

PART II: MONISM IN SPINOZA
Spinoza on Composition and Priority; G.Guigon
Why Spinoza Is Not an Eleatic Monist (Or Why Diversity Exists); Y.T.Melamed
Spinoza’s Monism and the Reality Of The Finite; S.Nadler
Spinoza’s Monism? What Monism?; M.Laerke
Spinoza’s Demonstration of Monism: A New Line of Defense; M.Kulstad
Explanatory Completeness and Spinoza’s Monism; R.N.Goldstein

Philip has done a nice job with the volume, and I look forward to holding a copy in my hand and reading the papers! Get yours now!