(Can you figure out what I had for dinner tonight? OM NOM NOM. I had it at Marc and Kate’s and was just bowled over. I must make these soon, once I move, unpack, and get a bit settled. Because this is the sort of dish that dreams (delicious, pork filled dreams) are made of.)

The defense was on Monday. Yesterday I made the final revisions, fixing up typos and trying to beat the dissertation into the formatting required by the University. I should hear from the auditor tomorrow about whether it needs any formatting tweaks. Let’s hope not…because formatting that dissertation to the required specifications was not exactly the most pleasant of experiences.

But still! Done!

!!

Now I turn to the final push for packing. I’m leaving a week from today, though the bulk of my furniture and such will be packed up on Saturday. Yikes! I’m terribly excited to go. I’m looking forward to moving to Washington and to a really fantastic little town. I’m terribly excited to get started at Whitman and getting to know my lovely new colleagues. And, um, I’m really excited that I get to have a real job with a real paycheck. :)

But. But I’m going to miss the people here in Tucson something terrible. And I’m going to miss the mountains to the north, that I get to see every single day. And I’m going to miss the delicious cheap Mexican food that you can find on every corner. And while I certainly won’t miss the 100 degree days that our weathermen describe as “cool”, I may just find myself missing Tucson in February. Mostly, though, it’s about the people. It’ll be hard to say goodbye to my friends and mentors in the city.

But, still, I’m excited about moving on. These seven years here in Tucson have been fantastic…and I’m sure that life in Walla Walla will be just as good, if not better. (I just have to get there. And, to that end, I go back to packing!)

So let me say instead: AAAAH! Time is running short, people!

There are THREE DAYS until my dissertation defense. THREE. TRES. TROIS. DREI. (OK, you get the idea.) You know what this means? I’m rereading it. To remind myself of what I’m committed to. And to check for typos for the millionth (or fourth) time.

I finally wrote my acknowledgments. That’s good. I had to do it at home instead of a coffeeshop, though, because I kept starting to cry and then would get self-conscious. Who’d have thought that the stage of my dissertation that finally led to tears was the acknowledgments. Oof.

Anways. THREE DAYS to the defense.

And also? And also there are THIRTEEN DAYS until I leave Arizona. You’d think that my house would be further packed in light of this fact. You’d think, but you’d be wrong in so thinking. I haven’t even touched my kitchen yet. It’s like a big lumbering beast just waiting ready to pounce. Or, if not pounce, then serve as a clear example of what happens when you don’t move for long enough that you accumulate an extraordinary amount of stuff. (Did I really need those three dozen cookie cutters? I’m thinking the answer is no.) I’m hoping maybe Sunday I can begin to tackle it. If I’m finished rerererereading the dissertation, that is.

At least I got my hair chopped off. Getting a haircut is enough to feel productive for at least three days. It’s now only an inch and a half (maybe two inches?) long. Much better for surviving these miserably hot days.

And with that, we move full circle, back to complaining about the weather.

That was almost a week ago. (?!!! ?! !!) Since then I’ve caught up a bit on sleep and have starting packing. I snapped these pictures last night as I was packing books. (6 boxes of books, for what it’s worth. I thought there’d be more than that but instead it just seems like I had more library books on those shelves than anyone should ever be allowed to have checked out.) Here are some pictures:

and a strange mix of books in this one box:

The rest of this week will involve a lot of packing. Then I’m going to turn back to the dissertation and rereading a few things and doing all that formatting mess that you have to do to appease the University. And, with the way that time has been moving these days, that all will happen within the next few blinks of my eyes.

Anyways.

In the past I’ve wondered why the EV characterizes noble sophistry in a way that appears to depict Socrates’ own behavior. Isn’t that evidence that Socrates is a noble sophist? (And, if so, there are a variety of questions about why this is so and what it means for the relationship between Socrates, the EV, and the notion of being a philosopher.)

BUT. I don’t think we need to think that by characterizing some of Socrates’ actions as noble sophistry, the EV (and Plato by extension) is calling Socrates a sophist. Socrates’ is guided by two motivations: a love of wisdom and a divine command to exhort. When acting from this second motivation, he might rightly be considered a noble sophist. But that does not exhaust his actions. Quite frequently we see him act qua philosopher. And in these times he’s not acting as a noble sophist but instead as a philosopher.

After all, recall that at the beginning of the Sophist the EV notes that sometimes philosophers take on the appearance of sophists. The appearance of the sophist in the sixth definition is Socrates’ appearance as a sophist. And he appears that way when he is acting qua moral evangelist.

(I think a similar line of reasoning can be given about the midwife passage/characterization in the Theaetetus. Socrates is complex.)

Why a picture of a smoothie? It certainly wasn’t a special smoothie – just some frozen berries from a bag and a bit of yogurt and milk, blended together in happy harmony. No, this is a picture of a smoothie because it represents, at least in my head, what final revisions to a dissertation look like.

My life recently has looked like this: get up, go to a coffee shop and work. Come home and grab lunch while rereading portions of the final-final¹ revisions. Go back to the coffee shop and work some more. Come home and sleep. Wake up in the middle of the night worrying about stuff or having a eureka moment about how to say something in some paragraph of some chapter. Go back to sleep. Wake up and repeat.

And today I realized that I hadn’t had any fruit for at least three days. This is mainly because I’ve not gone to the grocery store. And because the bananas at Starbucks are always quite dodgy looking. And because I can’t figure out how three days have passed so quickly. So to get vitamins and those other things that tend to be found in fruit, I made, well, that.

Which brings me to the obviously false judgment for the day: finishing up one’s dissertation is a reason for being married. Why? How much better would this be if I had someone to clean my house for me! And cook for me! And do the dishes!! !!! (What? Marriage isn’t about those sorts of things? Pshaw, I saw. Pshaw indeed.) But no. Instead I am counting on Starbucks coffee², Trader Joe’s gnocchi alla sorrentina, and lots and lots of cereal to see me through this week. Maybe another smoothie, while I’m at it.

And, for fun, here are a couple more pictures from my week. First, the cute and cuddly Dusty, helping me work.

And then, a picture showing how hot it was in my house last Saturday. My swamp cooler was broken. And the sad thing? This wasn’t the peak of the heat. It topped out at 96-7 degrees in my house. This is enough to make for one Very. Grumpy. Michelle.

1. as opposed to merely final
2. Yeah, yeah. Starbucks. Why? Because their coffee, while not great, isn’t terrible. And you get free refills. And I quite like the one near my place, which has a comfy couch-like thing I can sit on. And have you tried their vanilla bean mini-scones? No? Well, my friend, stop judging until you do.

There.

Sorry. Things are busy over here. Like they have been all year, I guess. Except it keeps getting busier and, unfortunately, hours aren’t added to the day to make up for it.

Here’s what my schedule looks like from here on out, so at least you can understand a bit of the internet silence:

July 3 – final draft of dissertation due
July 19 – dissertation defense
July 29 – leave Tucson
August 2 – arrive in Walla Walla.

In the mix of all of that, I need to figure out what I’m moving and how I’m moving it. (I guess I should get on that.) I also want to spend time with friends, since this is the last time we’ll all be living in the same city together. And did I mention the World Cup is currently going on?

I just keep telling myself that somehow things work out. Everything will get done. The move will go as smoothly as moves tend to go. The cats will be disgruntled about being in a car for three days, but that’s ok. I’m not butchering Plato too badly with my crazy (but true!) views. Making sure that the formatting is correct for the dissertation will only take a few hours. *cough*

OK. Back to the trenches. It’s just me, Plato, and coffee. And my swamp cooler. Because…you know…Tucson. Summertime. Heat. Oof.

(I shall now return to the Republic, which is most definitely one of the most amazing things ever to have emerged from mankind.)

At the moment I’m working on a section that draws heavily from book six. And there’s a passage in book six that’s puzzling. It’s at 490c, and Socrates is talking. He’s just described the philosopher’s intellectual endeavors. Actually, it’s one of my very favorite bits of the Republic, so let me just quote it. He says: “It is the nature of the real lover of learning to struggle toward what is, not to remain with any of the many things that are believed to be, that, as he moves on, he neither loses nor lessens his erotic love until he grasps the being of each nature itself with the part of his soul that is fitted to grasp it, because of its kinship with it, and that, once getting near what really is and having intercourse with it and having begotten understanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished and – at that point, but not before – is relieved from the pains of giving birth?”

Yowsers.

Anyways. Just after this he asks Glaucon whether such a nature could ever follow from such a nature. Glaucon says no. Then we get our peculiar passage. Socrates asks “But rather a healthy and just character, with moderation following it.” Glaucon agrees. (And, for Greek readers, here it is: ἀλλ᾽ ὑγιές τε καὶ δίκαιον ἦθος, ᾧ καὶ σωφροσύνην ἕπεσθαι.)

Here’s the question: why does he say that moderation will follow the (already healthy and just) character? One’s character cannot be just without being moderate, after all. That, at least, seems to be one of the take home messages from the discussion of virtue in book four.

Can the ‘ᾧ’ refer to something other than ‘ἦθος’? Can the ‘ἕπεσθαι’ indicate some other sort of following that doesn’t indicate a temporal or causal priority of justice to moderation?

Anyways. I find this passage perplexing given Socrates’ discussion about virtue and the relationships between the virtues that we find in book four. But I don’t have much to say about it other than a general expression of puzzlement.

(This is at Ephesus in Turkey.)