It has been a busy and quite strange week for me. I’ve not managed, as a result, to get through anywhere near as much regular reading or writing as I would have liked to get through. Not that it was a bad week. It started in an almost uplifting way with the bridge march in Sydney. “Almost uplifting” because, while it was a moving collective experience, the reasons we were all there are so undeniably evil that they cast a dark stain over my every waking moment these days.

I did get a little work done, though. Reading-wise, I read a few shorter papers that look at applying Wittgenstein’s work to modern problems in scepticism (shout out to Duncan Pritchard for being absurdly productive and for making his work so easily available). I also started Neil O’Hara’s recent-ish book on basic moral certainty. It’s interesting, but a little schematic for my taste. My sense is that the approach it takes is a fairly standard one in modern ethics. This is a shame, because, while the ideas are interesting, the approach itself doesn’t do justice to the felt quality of ethical problems. I also think that some of his claims (a privileging of im-mediacy over mediated ethical judgements in particular) are confused.

Writing was a bit of a disaster. I got very distracted, very regularly. I will simply need to refocus during the coming week.

When it comes to other reading I made my way through John Hirst’s Sense and Nonsense in Australian History. He was a fairly well respected historian, who died about a decade ago now. There are some very well argued pieces in the book that challenged my understanding of Australian history, but there are also moments that I cannot help but find extraordinarily racist. I think, as well, that there are some conceptual confusions regarding multiculturalism. I would need to think about those further to substantiate the point. Not a waste of time (know thy enemy…), but probably not a book I’d recommend without caveats.