So, Monday and Tuesday I got up and ran my miles, on Monday especially satisfactorily. I rode the people’s limousine into Oxford and helped my charges at Oriel with their revision for collections at the end of the week (and ultimately for their final exams in a few weeks); I ran a couple of errands in Oxford; and when I returned to Abingdon, Margaret and I went over some of the knock-on consequences of her mother’s and my sister’s deaths. And other bits and bobs.
I didn’t run this morning, because I’m coming down with a cold, and it seemed that running two miles in windy 4° weather was just plain foolish under the circumstances. Coffee and fruit breakfast (because I got confused about what day it is), and Margaret kindly postponed our planned walk in the Harcourt Arboretum to spare me the discomfort of the chill and wind (and the ever-present prospect of unexpected rain).
Because I have several other urgent things to do, I’ve been casually browsing reading material relevant to hermeneutics, this morning looking into the scholarship on Wittgenstein and Lonergan. In one source, I was pleased to see the author (Joseph Fitzpatrick) note that ‘… [L]ogical atomism was not based on any empirical study or investigation of words and how they operate, but represented the logician’s view of how words must function to be meaningful’, and ‘The later Wittgenstein is dead set against any explanation of the meaning of language that depends on an appeal to some hidden or occult entity that is said to lie beneath language’ (28–29). I will want to come back to these.