I've spent the last week and a half visiting family in Oregon and Montana. Total distance of travel over 3600 miles (over 5700 kilometers). In Montana I saw Pompeys Pillar, which was very interesting -- worth at least dropping by if you're ever in the Billings area. In Billings we attended a Strawberry Festival, where I picked up a few books at an antique store. I read one of them, Prisoner's Base by Rex Stout, on the flight back from Billings to Austin; it was very good. I like Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries in general, but it was one of the best I've read.
In any case, I'm still catching up on things that piled up while I was out, so, while there are things in the pipeline, things might be a bit inconsistent around here this week.
In the meantime:
(1) Philosopher's Carnival #164 went up last week at "The Splintered Mind".
The 165th Philosopher's Carnival will be here at Siris at some point approaching mid-July. If you come across any excellent philosophical posts on other weblogs starting about June 10 or 11 into July, feel free to send the links my way.
(2) I had originally planned to do Menexenus after Ion, but I've decided to do Hippias Minor instead, the post for which should be up tonight or tomorrow morning. (I think Hippias Minor connects better with Phaedrus and Ion, and I want to save Menexenus until I can also look in detail at Pericles' Funeral Oration, which it obviously opposes.) In the meantime, Paul Woodruff has an article at the SEP on Plato's Shorter Ethical Works, of which Hippias Minor is one.
Gorgias, Lysis, and Laches are currently planned after Hippias Minor, but I might, as a breather, interpose a non-Platonic dialogue somewhere, namely, Plutarch's Socrates' Daimonion -- one of the other books I grabbed in Billings was Selected Essays and Dialogues of Plutarch, and it has what (at least at a glance) looks like a decent translation. Gorgias is the absolute must-do this week, and will certainly take several posts; Lysis and Laches I'll do as long as I have the time and don't think it will cut too much into Timaeus and Critias next week.
[ADDED LATER: Almost as soon as I put this up, I started thinking that perhaps I would rather do Euthydemus than Laches at this point. I am increasingly inclining to that now. It's a closer fit. I also had forgotten that I want to smuggle in the spurious dialogue On Justice about the time I did Gorgias. So we'll see how much I actually manage to get done this week.]
(3) A good post at "More Man Than Philosopher": The Detective Story as a Religious Exercise.
(4) St. Anthony of Padua's feastday was June 13. Anthropologists at the University of Padua recently did a forensic reconstruction of what he would have looked like, based on a digital scan of his skull.
(5) SF Debris had a good appreciation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (the first three books in the Foundation series) earlier this month.
