Well, doing that is a more productive form of procrastination than some alternatives that I could mention. And Ask Philosophers is a Good Thing. I can warmly recommend the philosophical good sense and humanity of many of my co-panellists (particularly Louise Antony, Richard Heck, Thomas Pogge, and Allen Stairs).

The Bertrand Russell Professorship of Philosophy has now been advertised. The title is now wonderful: as to the work/money/living costs … well, it will be very interesting to see who is still susceptible to the other inestimable attractions of Cambridge.

Mind you, I’m only saying try …

[Added] Well, since that page was accessed over 1400 times in the first two days, maybe there is rather more interest than I thought!

Later we spent a very enjoyable and instructive hour at the (sparsely attended, so pleasingly very quiet) free exhibition at the National Gallery, Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries.

One room, ‘Being Botticelli’, raises something of a philosophical question. There, side by side, are two paintings bought by the gallery in 1874, from a sale of pictures collected by one Alexander Barker. The first is the wonderful ‘Venus and Mars’. The other picture, ‘An Allegory’ is a crude travesty (though it isn’t a fake — scientific investigation shows that it wasn’t painted long after Botticelli’s masterpiece.)

Yet at the time, this too was confidently attributed to Botticelli, and indeed at the sale commanded the higher price. But now, seeing them together, even the most casual gallery visitor (counting myself as one) must think how was that possible?. How was it not just obvious at the time that the paintings were of utterly different quality, technically and aesthetically? — well perhaps that’s not quite so obvious from the small reproductions here, but stand in front of the pictures, and the difference is startling. The proud buyers of ‘An Allegory’ for the nation must have seen the picture differently: what is it about aesthetic perception that can allow such extraordinary shifts?

I’m sure some philosopher must have written interestingly about such things. Suggestions?

It is no wonder that we love our books: in reading them, we cradle them close to our heart.¹

Yes. And we similarly cradle an iPad. Even the Apple cover, with which we lovingly protect it, is designed to make the iPad’s hard shell seem softer and warmer in the hand — more like a book in fact. And the experience of reading on the iPad is as good as the tactile feel. Even those PDFs of articles you’ve downloaded from JSTOR, or scanned older books acquired one way or another, are at least as readable as your crumpled print-outs; and proper ebooks or modern PDFs of academic books are a delight. It was no surprise to me, then, that a recent study suggests that people find the experience of reading on an iPad (or indeed a Kindle) comparable with reading a printed book, and both much to be preferred to reading on a computer screen.

And that’s not to mention the ease of reading e.g. Anna Karenina in bed, rather than that handsome but massive hardback of the wonderful newish Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (about which more another time).

So — as someone who spends a lot of the day reading on screen — I haven’t had a moment’s regret about getting an iPad. On the contrary, I get more pleased as the days go by. Of course, it isn’t a laptop substitute for when e.g. you want to do extended writing in LaTeX (though I can imagine that soon enough we’ll even be able to do at least modest amounts even of that, adding a paragraph or two to a paper-in-progress: imagine the next version of DropBox has a built-in text editor, you can send source files to be compiled to some server which sends the result back to DropBox, and you can flip between source and PDF …). But for reading papers in the almost-awesome Papers², or reading books in PDF form, for internet trawling, keeping tabs on your emails, jotting down a few notes in Evernote (automatically synced to your computer), updating appointments and other low-key writing tasks — and even maintaining a blog! — the iPad is fantastic. I find myself taking the it around more and more instead of a laptop.

Of course, those of you who prefer hair shirts to cashmere can buy a cheap-as-cheaps netbook, become Linux geeks, and feel superior: but I’d rather have the aesthetics and delights of the iPad, thank you very much.

^{1. I steal this thought from http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/}

^{2. Why oh why is the long promised Papers v.2 so alarmingly delayed? We just want (a) Papers to be aware of PDF books as well as articles, and perhaps (b) to allow a bit of highlighting/annotating of PDFs. Is that too much to ask?}

Dirty weekends in Paris versus wearing Playboy bunny ears in a cheap motel @rumandreason:  http://bit.ly/aLPuWl

The Daughter is much amused to report that this teasing pointer — read very largely by philosophers who follow the tweets (or the emphera here) — got her the highest number of daily page-hits ever. As she tartly observed, “I thought your lot were meant to be intellectual”.

But I’m of course sure that you were all just after the recipe for chocolate ice cream …

Just to note, however, that I have slightly revised some notes I posted here before on Ch. 4 of Field’s Saving Truth from Paradox. Not that these notes are at all exciting. But still, if they are going to be “out there”, they should at least be in a better version.

Andrea del Verrocchio, Head of a woman (detail), c. 1475.

To London today for the annual meeting of the Analysis Committee. The journal seems in cheering health (though it seems as if the now out-of-control “publish or perish” pressures are leading to almost absurd numbers of submissions).

Then, across the road from the Senate House to the British Museum. I’d clean forgotten that there is an exhibition of Italian renaissance drawings on there, some from the BM itself, some from the Uffizi.

So that was an absolutely delightful surprise — some wonderful drawings, very beautifully presented, and not so many on show as to be overwhelming. Go (it’s on until  July 25).