Ave atque vale

[robinturner]

Dammit, I was just settling down to feeling contented, having got over a sizeable hump in my work life (all papers graded!) and now I feel melancholy. One reason is minor, but too personal to get into here (that's not so much personal as in my person, as in involving a person I don't want to bring into a public forum). The other is that I've just heard that John Rawls has died. Since he died at the age of 81 after a fairly eudaemonic life, I'm not exactly upset, but as I said, a little melancholy. However many holes you can poke in his arguments (and work of such ambitious scope has to have a few holes), he was definitely one of the major names in twentieth-century philosophy. I even played around with some of his catch-phrases in a recent paper ("a thin theory of the good" became "a very thin theory of the good", and "the difference principle" became "the diffidence principle").

Not a happy Solri, now!