British Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy
                                  Editor - Andrew Stephenson (Oxford)

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Hobson 6 Some  Non-Sequential Subjective Diary-Jottings Pretending to be a Conference Report  by Jud Evans (A mature to overripe graduate from the University of Central Lancashire)

I look at the key the helpful porter had placed in my hand. The tag reads 'Hobson 6.'

Wearily I insert the key in the door and enter the all-white painted room. I am pleasantly surprised at its size and its contemporary cheerfulness. I had expected it to be smaller and pokier after negotiating the warren of narrow stairs and short landings which led to it. I put my two heavy bags down and lean my back against the wall in between the two windows with their long-drop orange curtains and black and white eye-dazzling painting of zebras.

    I stride forward Cleese-like and measure my paces - first one way, then the other across the floor of the high-ceilinged room. I feel slightly ridiculous - why am I doing this? It measures eighteen feet both ways. I look up and note the single electric fitting on the ceiling with its energy-saving bulb and alongside it the slightly minacious nozzle of a sprinkler-system.

Chair Edward Grefenstette [dark suit]  flanked by other BUPS officers

    It suddenly comes to me why I am obsessively recording the furnishings, layout and appearance of this room - I want to remember and savour everything about the place whilst attending this Winter Conference of the British Undergraduates Philosophy Society.


I still haven't recovered properly from the first sight of this emblematic example of British culture. Of course I am delighted, for my paper was selected out of many by the officers of the BUPS together with certain academic members of one of our greatest universities. The piece I will read on Sunday is on *Eliminative Determinism* - my own creature - and it was honed against the constructive carborundum of the great minds on the Yahoo Analytical Indicant Theory and Nominalist Lists, for which I thank my friends for their constant stimulation and perceptive insights.

     I stagger along Trumpington Road weighed down by my heavy load when I initially catch sight of it - the imposing metal gates, the grass-covered quadrangle; the ancient atmospheric beige-coloured buildings that flank it. It is at once redolent of a mixture of Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes and the novel by Evelyn Waugh  - Brideshead Revisited.

    St. Catherine's College was founded in 1473 and is situated in the centre of Cambridge. It was largely rebuilt in the 17th century with work on the Main Court beginning in 1673; the Chapel was completed in 1704. The College comprises the Master, Professor David Ingram, 58 Fellows and Research Fellows, some 150 graduate students, and about 410 undergraduates.

   It is love at first sight. I drop my cases to the ground and stare at it in disbelief and almost weep that because of my working-class origins I had missed out on it when I was a young enough man to fully experience its delights.

   As a snotty-nosed street-Arab from the back-streets of Liverpool, Cambridge University has always appeared in my mind as a wondrous upper-class 'otherworld' - a Wizard of Oz place invoking plebeian wonderment, curiosity and admiration. An essentially *British* place - where all the better disparate influences of Britishness converged and had their felicitous copulation, which later resulted and gave birth to world-changing ideas that in spite of the eventual parturition that followed in the break with America  - are still ensconced as the empirical bedrock of commonsense in both of our countries.

    I know [that like parliament] it will feel a bit like being in church - but I am ready to carry out my obeisances and kneel in the quad and stay awhile as the hirtenschalmei, the rebecs and the sackbuts strike up, whilst I am danced around by the parti-coloured gangling gallimaufry of philosophical opinions.

    I think about my car parked in the outer suburbs of Cambridge in order that I can save the seventy pounds parking charges it would cost to leave it in one of the overpriced multi-storey car parks in this car-choked city for the four days of my stay. Is it false economy - will it be vandalised in that dark, windy lane outside that factory in the northern outskirts? Is a seventy quid saving worth the four days of worry?

      I rest my laptop computer upon the lime-wood desk which shares a wall with a sink and small square matching low table. There is a single bed covered by a white duvet and two pillows. Beside the bed is a locker with three drawers and a small lamp with a globular base rests upon it. On one wall there is a small fireplace covered in with a blank, for the room has been modernised and equipped with a five-foot panel central-heating radiator. Recessed wardrobes containing plenty of hanging-space have been provided on either side of the fireplace.

                                I deliver a verdict upon the room -*cosy and clean.*


    Could this be the actual fireplace that Popper, Wittgenstein and Russell sat around arguing when the wild-eyed, tousle-headed metaphysician who was Hitler's classmate grabbed the poker and had to be restrained by the diminutive Lord Russell from hitting the petrified observationalist-inductivist Karl Popper over the pate with it?

It is rectangular without any decoration. It appears to be modern even to have dated back to the thirties or forties. The only item that might be of any age is the wooden mantelpiece which is supported by a decorated architrave - but even that can only be late Victorian?

Suddenly feeling tired, I lie on my back on the bed I look at the painting of the zebras. The stripes make my eyes hurt so I close them.

    One wall is fitted with a large 8' x 4' display board. It is covered in dark brown baize cloth. On it a solitary typewritten sheet hangs crookedly. I discover it  outlines the charging routine should one decide to use the white wall-mounted telephone that hangs between the two curtained windows. The board also boasts a Robbie Williams calendar pinned through its metal-spiralled spine with three drawing-pins. It is open at the page for the month of November 2006 - it is the 14th of December 2006  today. The singer is pictured with the top part of his heavily tattooed body and hairy chest  unclothed. His handsome face and impressive white dental-job is gashed by the most grotesque false smile I have ever seen.

   The room is silent, but in the background there is the sound of something mechanical - something revolving accompanied by a tinny vibration noise. It must be the central heating pump that distributes the hot water to the other rooms that are situated in higgledy-piggledy randomness throughout 'Hobson.’


FRIDAY.
I was first down for breakfast at 7.45. PM. There had been a Christmas Party the night before so the dining room looked as if a bomb had hit it. The food was good. At 10.am I wander over to The Ramsey Room on the far side of the quad and introduce myself to the chairman Edward Grefenstette and some members of the committee who were putting the finishing touches to the room and registering any delegates who were early arrivals.

The keynote and opening speaker at this conference is Professor Simon Blackburn who I much admire for what he wrote about the dreadful Heidegger and his thrill-seeking thurifer-thrall Hannah Arendt. Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Until recently he was Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and from 1969 to 1990 he was a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford.

	The eminent Cambridge academic isn't due to speak until 1.30pm  - so we are free to wander around the city centre and take a look around. I elect to accompany General Committee Member Joe Cunningham (Heythrop) and BJUP Sub-Editor: Ryan Dawson (Cambridge) on a quest for food - both prove to be charming and stimulating companions for such an important excursion.
Ryan Dawson (Cambridge)		Joe Cunningham (Heythrop)

        Back at 1.pm and Professor Blackburn showed up and the conference kicked off.

    He gives  a fascinating  talk on Disjunctivism for three-quarters of an hour. It dealt with re-thinking ‘becoming aware of something via the senses’ as perceptual participation. The explanation explores the connection between the definitive nature of perceptual content on the one hand and the acting and perceiving of the sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned on the other.

Prof. Blackburn [left] Hoping some of his brilliance will rub off on me

   I chip in at question time and preface my remarks by telling him that I am probably his oldest groupie and that I aren't speaking metaphorically either. I then ask him if he could kindly characterise what he meant by 'situations' and ‘combinations of circumstances' which were terms that had figured a lot in his lecture. I mention that I am an Eliminative Determinist and make a reference to the fact that for me 'situations, states of affairs and combinations of circumstances' don't exist and that only the material objects that are actually extant can be discovered together or apart in what humans called the  'circumstances'  that *exist* in the world.

To my amazement he takes the idea on board and says that such a view presents  problems for disjunctivism [and much else] and that more thought should be given to such an approach.

    Whether this is a standard answer of his to such undergraduate interventions I will never know. It would not have actually worried me if he HAD vigorously opposed my rigorously reductionist ideas, to employ a maritime metaphor, for the Eliminativist Fire-Ship had already been hermeneutically heeled, the parasitical barnacles of *Being* scraped from the copper-bottom [where they infest all craft, and hamper progress.] The vessel has been trimmed for sea and any leaks cognitively caulked. The anti- transcendentalist tar-barrels are already hoisted to the thwarts in readiness to be torched and dropped on any would-be boarders  if the need should arise to repel any buccaneer bearers of the banner of the infamous belief in *Being* that infest academic waters and prey on all philosophical vessels of exploration.

     Worst are the double-eye-patched sea-dogs who garland their necks with strings of French onions and smoke endless packets of Gauloise [Golliwog was a World War II British naval slang for a Gauloise cigarette, because the tobacco was nearly black in colour ] that crew the garrulous unseaworthy, top-hampered galleons of continental philosophy. Their hulks are shot through with the Teredo-worm and dangerously loaded to the gunnels with countless barrels of sauerkraut with which they feed their ravenous transcendentalism.

    I find Professor Blackburn to be charming and a wonderfully accomplished  extempore speaker, matched only in his profound knowledge of his subject matter and lack of any need for notes by the amazing  Craig French of Heythrop College, University of London -  a BUPS committee member whose role is to liaise with individual philosophy societies across the UK, offering advice and support. Craig flawlessly romps through his fascinating twenty-minute *Non-Epistemicism, Hinge Propositions and the Many faces of Scepticism* without more than a couple of quick squints at his complicated but profoundly interesting paper. Simon Blackburn is obviously highly respected and much esteemed by the younger set of philosophers.


      We are all invited to join the conference delegates in a Cambridge pub crawl, but the thought of trailing around as an elderly 'tail-end-Charlie* with crowd of youngsters out on the razzle was not a prospect that appealed to me. In any case, I am due to spend a couple of hours with a relative based in the south who has volunteered to catch a train to Cambridge and spend a couple of hours with me.

     After meeting my relative and going to a local pub for a snack and a drink,  I walk him to the station and  I  jump the shuttle bus [Park and Ride] and ride out to the suburbs to check out my car. Apart from the windows being splattered with bird-shit it seems OK. I hadn't realised that a nearby electric pylon was a favourite gathering place for crowds of starlings, and the car looked as if somebody had sprayed it with the contents of the nearby local sewerage farm. Talk about being shit on from a great height!

    Whilst I am removing the worst of it, our eldest boy Cameron rings me on my mobile to have a chat. It is surrealistic talking to him in some God-forsaken dark lane in the south of England,  with the phone in one hand whilst spraying the vehicle with car-shampoo with the other.

   After that I catch the shuttle-bus back to the centre.

  I am quite happy sitting here on my own in this restaurant in Trumpington Street.  I  treat myself to a slap-up meal and a bottle of Turkish Kavaklidere 2002 "Yakut" (Oküzgözü d'Elazig ) It's a clear ruby in colour.  This Turkish red breathes pleasant if subdued aromas of black plums and cherries.

I  lounge here at the table and observe in others how I used to act myself  long ago. I refer to the young, for Cambridge, is the city of youth. I sit eating my vegetable goulash watching the quick body movements, the animated faces, and listen to the fast confident talk, the flirting, the occasional peals of laughter and the squeals of delight. But the taste of the wine makes my eyes grow wet with tears as I remember the good old days and my friends of yore when I owned a hotel in that pleasant land from where my wine originates and all the world was young. I recover quickly. Covertly I dab my eyes and mull over the day's events at the college.

I knock back more of the Oküzgözü d'Elazig but it proves too much to drink all at once.

*I'm afraid I can't manage the whole bottle,* I say to the swarthy waiter. ‘I will pay the bill now - could you kindly put a cork in the bottle - I will take what I can't drink now back to the college.’


More soon.


For a lighthearted look at *Wittgenstein's Poker* click here

NOTES
[1] On the evening of Friday, 25 October 1946 the Cambridge Moral Science Club - a weekly discussion group for the university's philosophers and philosophy students - held one of its regular meetings. As usual, the members assembled in King's College at 8.30, in a set of rooms in the Gibbs Building - number 3 on staircase H. That evening the guest speaker was Dr. Karl Popper, down from London to deliver an innocuous-sounding paper, 'Are There Philosophical Problems?'. Among his audience was the chairman of the club, Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the most brilliant philosopher of his time. Also present was Bertrand Russell, who for decades had been a household name as a philosopher and radical campaigner.

Quoted from; ‘Wittgenstein's Poker’ by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Review accessed November 21, 2001 Guardian Unlimited http://books.guardian.co.uk/firstbook2001/story/0,10486,603100,00.html