SIEPM

Just a quick report from the big SIEPM conference this week in Freising (outskirts of my new home, Munich). It has been very interesting, I saw good papers from grad students working on Islamic philosophy and its relation to Latin philosophy, an excellent panel on Maimonides with three of the world-leading scholars on him, and have given a couple of papers myself. Reports on the "state of the art" have included Charles Burnett's fairly upbeat assessment of projects and publications in his and my area of Arabic philosophy and its transmission. This conference gathers together a huge number of people who work on medieval thought -- you would never think, looking around, that this is actually one of the less populated fields of the discipline! It's great to see how many panels there are on philosophy in the Islamic world, too -- this has been a real change, even during my career, because I can remember going to SIEPM events which didn't have nearly as many papers on this topic. Byzantine medieval is also managing to make an appearance, though it's pretty clearly third place (in terms of how much attention it gets) behind Latin Europe medieval and then Islamic medieval.