It is early August and the summer holidays are over. So is my time on parental leave. Since this past Sunday I work for Uppsala University as Lecturer in practical philosophy. This is only a temporary position, however. In June I finally received positive news on a post doc application. Sometime next year I will start a three year research project on Libertarian Paternalism – the idea that people can be made to make better choices without any restrictions of their liberty. This alleged new ism has received increased attention with the publication of the book Nudge (2008), that I reviewed for Tidskrift för Politisk Filosofi this spring (forgot to tell you). The first two years I will be located at Keele University in England, working with Dr. Angus Dawson. The last year I will be located at Stockholm University, working with Professor Torbjörn Tännsjö and Dr. Niklas Juth of the Karolinska Institute.

Grading my course at Örebro University used up a lot of my working time in June – too ambitious perhaps to give personal feedback on the written assignment to 140 students. July was completely free of philosophy, dedicated instead to organizing a camp on communal living and co-counseling at Mundekulla Retreat Centre, and taking part in the Live Role-playing game Krigshjärta, as a sadistic pirate priest(!).

Since I didn’t do enough relaxing in July, it spilled over into August. At the moment, I enjoy finding my way back to my philosophical pursuits!

It is already full summer. I do not usually feel that “time flies”, that time passes more quickly now than before, but these past weeks I have had exactly that apparently common experience. Perhaps it’s the irregular sleep I get since we stopped feeding our baby at night and started trying to take control over his sleeping patterns. It used to be I could sleep and my wife Camilla would breast-feed him whenever he wanted. Now I am up singing to him and caressing him at night, and often getting up at 4.30 or 5.00 because he is wide awake. I hear there are otherwise conscious and modern couples, even friends of ours, in which the mother takes the kind of automatic responsibility she has traditionally taken and the father lives pretty much as he did before becoming a father. For Camilla and me, shared responsibility was always the default (if she had to breast-feed, I would do something else instead, like changing diapers). We take steps away from perfect equality, but we do so consciously, because I have a career (that brings in money) and she doesn’t (yet).

In April I held a philosophical salon on Future Generations at Stockholm city library with my friend Lars Lindblom and one on my own on Love at Falun city library, my old home town. I prepared for a conference in Iceland that was cancelled due to the ash cloud and we visited Malta to celebrate my father’s 60th birthday. On last of April I held the traditional speech to the spring here in Stjärnsund, a pleasant honor. I also started preparations to sell my apartment in Stockholm, taking another step away from a past life. And, not least, I received the rank of first Dan in Shorinji Kempo, the martial art I practice.

May was partly focused on getting the apartment ready for viewing, it is now sold for slightly less than I expected and I had the peculiar experience of being disappointed with a mere 60% return on my investment over six years. I held a course in Technology and Ethics at Örebro University, worked on some old papers, and took part in a philosophical cruise to Finland, speaking again on Love. I should really write a short book on Love some day. I also work towards my graduation as philosophical counselor, receiving guests under supervision from my good teacher Helge Svare in Oslo.

It is now June and I fully enjoy sitting outside my little house, writing on my laptop, hearing the leaves and feeling the sun. In this setting even grading 140 essays from the Örebro course could be rather pleasant.

I held a philosophical café today in Stjärnsund, the second one this month. Rather small groups, good discussions. What I do is I let people propose questions, we discuss them for a while, then vote for one question to investigate more thoroughly. Last time the winner was “What is a good life”, today “What is liberty?” and “What is responsibility?” (the group thought these two were close enough to be combined).

The main philosophy event this month was a Workshop on Climate Change in Uppsala, where I presented some new ideas on the value of population size in the future. Many of us have a strong intuition that the world is neither better nor worse for having more people around, disregarding their effects on others and on nature. However, this intuition seems inconsistent with the strong intuition that it is better to get an addition of happy people than to get an addition of less happy people. If status quo is equally good as addition A and equally good as addition B, it would seem addition A and addition B must be equally good. I get around this problem by making the value of the existence of future people relative to the context they exist in. It might be a good idea, I will give it some more time.

It is already March but the snow is deeper than ever in Stjärnsund. When it is sunny it is a true wonderland. I cannot agree with all those who claim to be tired of it. I am still officially on parental leave and try to spend more time with my wonderful baby boy Maui this semester. In February, I took him, and his mother, to see his grandfather and extra grandmother in Spain for a week. A pleasant trip which included a short swim in the Mediterranean, a tour through blossoming almond tree country and introducing our hosts to the awesome game Ticket to Ride. Philosophywise, I submitted four applications for postdoc funding this month (it’s getting tiresome), finished an article on alcohol interlocks in cars for Swedish journal Socialmedicinsk tidskrift with my co-author Jessica Fahlquist, wrote a report on ethics for my friend Jan Aronsson‘s project on a new value policy for the Swedish National Heritage Board, and pondered some old and some new ideas. I was also invited to a training workshop for doctoral students in Manchester and held a 90 min workshop on conceptual analysis in applied ethics.

A new year, a new decade. I hope there will be more peace and more fairness this decade, greater respect for nature and the wilderness, and more tolerance and understanding among human beings. I will try to make tiny contributions by supporting various non-profit organizations and causes with money, signatures and occasionally more substantial efforts. I also hope my philosophical work will in some roundabout way help people and nature.

It is partly because this connection is often hard to see for academic philosophy that I helped start the philosophical society Sherpa and that I now offer philosophical counseling as a more direct way to positively affect people’s lives (more substantial info on what I offer in Swedish here). As part of Sherpa’s program at the Stockholm City Library I held a salon (with Niklas Möller) and a lecture on Freedom and Dependence in mid December. Both were well attended and seemingly much appreciated.

Christmas and New Years were followed by a “Road Retreat” that I did with my wife and son around southern Sweden. Inspiring. I decided not to commit to too many philosophy projects this spring but leave time for other things, like family, fun and fiction. Most of the philosophy work I will do these two months will be focused on applications for post-docs, work that I hope will result in publications sometime in the future.

There will only be a few minutes left of this month when I hit “publish”. Good, I look forward to December, hoping for snow, more candlelight, more time for movies and games. November has mostly been about applications for postdocs and the race is not yet over. Also, there is always another finishing touch to be made on a paper. I had hoped not to mention the encyclopedia entry on Paternalism in this post, but there it is.

Just now, I finished an ad for myself and my friend Jan Aronson, for the magazine Leva. January 21st we will hopefully start a series of group philosophy discussions, or couceling sessions, for couples. Also, I will offer private philosophical counseling in Stockholm Fridays starting January, see more under “philosophical counseling” in the right hand panel (or “filosofisk rådgivning for Swedish).

I have turned 33. A beautiful number somehow, symmetrical. The day was spent with a few close friends, enjoying board games, good food and drink, hot tub and sauna. Workwise the month was mostly used to finishing the Applied Ethics Encyclopedia entry on Paternalism. I also applied for a post-doc position at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford – very interesting and fun research. By chance I am reading the SF novel Accelerando by Charles Stross, which has popularized several of the ideas which are pondered at the Institute. At the moment I am in Göteborg where I was invited to take part in a philosophy show for Swedish National Radio (Filosofiska Rummet i P1). This provided a welcome opportunity to visit my brother Martin and his family. Though I miss my own little family.

The trees are turning beautifully red and yellow in Stjärnsund. The public defense of my thesis on the 8th already seems far away. Not to over-prepare, I held my first lecture on Research Ethics for master students at KTH on the 7th. Later in the month I debated file sharing at the Philosophy Club of Lund University with the lecturer of law Ulf Maunsbach and the journalist Andreas Ekström. As a preparation I wrote an article (in Swedish) summing up the case for free file sharing. I also held a philosophical salon with my friend Jan Aronsson at the Stockholm City Library on Good & Evil. The salon was part of a series by Filosofigruppen Sherpa. It is challenging and stimulating to talk philosphy with a very diverse group of 50 people or so – women and men, all ages and backgrounds, all choosing to spend their Wednesday night at the library with us. Tomorrow my “elders” Manitonquat and Ellika will have a workshop here in Stjärnsund on the Native american way – the Circle way. Then it’s time to start to get serious about the entry on Paternalism that I’m preparing for the 2d edition of Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics. While spending time with my wife and baby boy of course.

Marking my advancement to PhD on September 8th, I launch this new design for my private and professional website. The site will be improved and enriched during the coming couple of weeks.