What interdisciplinarity looks like

I had a very varied day today.

A colleague in classics and I hope to become the co-directors of a new Center for Ancient and Medieval Philosophy in Durham (the meeting to approved the center will be next week, and we've been assured it'll happen, but it isn't official yet). We met this morning for our first "directorial" meeting, to discuss what we want to do, assuming we get approval, to launch the center in fall. There was a lot of discussion of what sorts of philosophy cut across both the ancient and medieval periods so that we can truly get our two departments (plus history and theology) all involved.

In the afternoon, I'd arranged to meet someone in the algorithms and computation group, who is interested in having Durham host Computability in Europe here in 2019. I haven't been to CiE since 2010, but when he approached the governing board of the conference series, someone on it suggested he get in contact with me, as someone who wants to promote the profile of logic in Durham. So we had a lively discussion about model checking and logics for verification and descriptive complexity.

In between the two, I popped by the library to pick up an ILL book, containing the diary of an early 15th century Florentine shipping captain.

Afterwards, it was back to my office to do some quick fact checking in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for a student of mine working on logical models of time-travel, and then prepare to give a seminar on recursive sets and recursive functions.

Yeah. This is what interdisciplinarity looks like.