Quodlibeta

Back from Italy but have been involved in finding a new home, organising a wedding (my own!) and leaving for a holiday in Spain with my fiancee this afternoon. That means there hasn't been much time to post here and I hope normal service will resume in a couple of weeks.

My trip to Italy finished off with Florence and Parma. While there are some great sights in Florence (I got to look through Galileo's telescope) it is the smaller cities like Ferrara and Parma which are the more charming. They are quiet, clean and without tourists. The only queue I had to join was at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence - even in that city all the other stuff was uncrowded. But in Parma and Ferrara I was the only person in the room, if not the whole building, a lot of the time.

My writing project for October (a part from school stuff) will be to comment on the materialist theories of the mind and I have Steven Pinker packed in my bag for Spain. Some people have become worried that science has not only killed the soul, but even killed our capacity for freewill and hence good. Needless to say, I am far from convinced but will wait to see what Professor Pinker has to say on the matter.