more book fun

I'm now the proud owner of yet another book that no one else on LibraryThing has: Die Beinamen der Pariser Steuerrolle von 1292 unter Heranziehung der Steuerrolle von 1313 und zahlreicher Urkunden, by Rudolf Pachnio. I ordered it from an antiquarian in Germany, it arrived today from France, and the front cover is stamped "Library of Congress". Pretty cool.

the paper, it just keeps growing

So last spring I started a paper on the effect that the 1277 condemnations in Paris and Oxford had on the development of modal and temporal logic in the 14th century and later. It was to be my spring project: I would start and finish it, and it would then be ready to become a dissertation chapter. Well, it got started. Lots of articles photocopied and underlined, lots of books read, roughly 12 pages of text, 4 pages of notes, and 4 pages of bibliography. And then life caught up with me in May, other projects (such as the talk I was giving in Switzerland the first weekend in June) took priority, and the result was that it sat until the beginning of this month, when I sat back down again bound and determined to finish it by the end of this month.

Progress has been made. But the darned paper, it just keeps on growing. We're now at 20 pages of text, almost 6 pages of bibliography, and 60 footnotes -- down from ~80 earlier today after I figured out a different way of doing some of my citations. This is the paper to go into my dissertation to prove that I can do historical research, but it is definitely reminding me why I'm a logician first and foremost and not a historian. I finally reached the point today where I was able to start writing the paragraphs which actually talk about logic *gasp*. It was such a nice feeling. But I feel like otherwise I have been fighting with this paper every step of the way: The organization, the detail, the presentation, the content, everything. And even though I am a strong champion of negative conclusions ("Here's an interesting question: Can we find any evidence for X?" Suitable amount of research later: "Here's the boring answer: Not really."), because I think that it is bad for research in general if only positive answers are rewarded, because it encourages people to only ask questions which have positive answers, it is nevertheless frustrating that one year and 26 pages later, all I've really got to say in my conclusion is "The 1277 condemnation of Stephen Tempier in Paris and the 1277 prohibition of Robert Kilwardby in Oxford really didn't have that much effect on the development of logic at all". Ah well, I've exceeded expectations in one way: My goal is 20 pages per chapter, and anything more than that is bonus. And it's still not unrealistic that by the end of the week I'll have something finished enough that I can send it to Benedikt for comment, only 10 months later than planned...(let's hope the rest of the dissertation doesn't go this way!)