Bokchoy Tang

I spent yesterday morning working on my PHI110 essay. I caught the tram into the city at around 3pm. Dropped into Reader’s Feast; noticed there’s a nice new line of Penguins out, called Great Ideas, they’re lush little books, with rough-stock covers and bold embossed designs. They feel nice. I would like to buy a couple before they’re out of print. Ended up purchasing the 70th anniversary Pocket Penguin edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Mirror Of Ink. I especially like this quote from Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane;

We decided it was time to end the almost customary half-hearted manner in which cheap editions were produced – as though the only people who could possibly want cheap editions must belong to a lower order of intelligence. We, however, believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it

I met up with a friend for coffee at Jungle Juice, then to the State Library for a couple of hours reading. Found Avram Koel’s Atoms, Pleasure, Virtue: The Philosophy of Epicurus quite useful. On Epicurus;

I have argued that Epicurus has a total vision, articulated in considerable detail as a conscious philosophical response to the positions of his predecessors, in particular Aristotle; and that despite the eclectic nature of his thought, or even because of it, his vision achieves an uncontested clartity and an unprecedented urgency in the context of ancient philosophy.

And further, on the Hellenistic concept of the noble sage;

Who is such a sage? What exactly has he accomplished? Armed with his inquiry into the nature of the world and of reality, he is fearless with respect to the gods and death; trained in the calculus of his desires which shows forth their limits, he pursues a steady course of action with unique singularity of purpose, steering clear of both frustration and indulgence.

Later, I met up with PH and my parents for a drink at Movida, before moving on to Bokchoy Tang for the third of my birthday dinners. For entrée; cabbage rolls, duck strip salad, Jiao Zi dumpling. For mains, I had lamb medallions with Szechwan pepper chilli sauce; It was all beautiful. After dinner, coffee and cakes at Brunetti’s. I received a couple more birthday gifts; a bottle of Bombay Sapphire from by absent brother, and from my parents, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, which I’d been eyeing off in the bookshop for months. The entry on backgammon;

Board game for two players, renowned among philosophers as one of Hume’s methods of recovery from philosophical melancholy and scepticism. “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour’s amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appears so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther” (A Treatise on Human Nature, I. iv. 7). If we may follow Adam Smith’s account of Hume in later life, however, the philosopher’s favourite game was actually whist.