Back at last to matters categorial
Well, all that took much, much longer than planned! Having spent days sorting the shared books round the house, I was on a roll, and found myself seriously tackling my study for the first time in years. In the end, perhaps seven or eight feet of books have gone. And I feel all the better for it. A lot of second-division philosophy I certainly won’t be looking at again; no more baleful stares from those books that I’ll now never get round to reading; a couple of feet of mathematics books has gone too, texts I surely won’t seriously look at again (and which anyway are all available as PDFs in the familiar place we don’t talk about). But that leaves a well-populated wall. And I’ve kept most of Logic Corner for now too. Because I have plans …
Of course, most of you will think that that is still a quite ridiculous number of books. But then I belong to that thinning generation of academics for whom (in many cases) buying books was all tied up with our identity in what I suppose now seems rather foolish ways.
That major sort-out was all very distracting, though very good to get done. But I’ve meanwhile been tinkering away on and off with Category Theory II. In fact, I’ve made quite a few little presentational and other changes in earlier chapters, as well as splitting the material on Yoneda into two chapters again, and then I have newly tidied the chapter on representables. I guess I still want to say a little about the more elementary implications of Yoneda, but enthusiasts can download the latest version here. That leaves just the four chapters on Galois connections and adjunctions for initial revision. Then we’ll have to see how things stand. But the way things are going, Parts I and II together will already be a little over 400 pages which is surely enough for what is supposed to be a Gentle Introduction (which I never really planned to write in the first place). So at the moment I’m inclined to do no more than tie up a loose end or two and then stop.