the end has come

Aidan has declared victory over year three, Shawn over year two. It is now my turn to declare victory over year one. This year has been incredibly busy, but at the same time incredibly rewarding. I spent the entire today grading in order to finish before the weekend. It sucked. Here is a recap of some of the not so sucky parts of year one:

First, John Gibbon’s ethics of belief class was very rewarding. I have gotten or will have gotten at least 5 papers out of things that I thought about in connection with that class. Plus, watching John lecture is a great experience. Mark van Roojen’s distributive justice seminar was also very rewarding–especially in class discussion. I also enjoyed Jan Dowell’s language class. I particularly enjoyed my paper topic–contextualism v. relativism in the gradable adjectives literature.

This semester I took my favorite class of all time, which was Dave Sobel’s seminar on subjectivism about welfare and reasons for action. We had some really nice discussions of some of the classic pieces in the literature. We also read all of Mark Schroeder’s new book The Slaves of the Passions. This was by far my favorite reading this year. It is very, very good. Well worth lots of energy. The paper I wrote for the class is also something I am proud of. A version of it will make up the first part of my MA thesis. I’ve put up the draft that I turned into Dave on my website. It’s called ‘Correctly Responding to Reasons and Internalism about Rationality.’ You can find it here.

My other classes were unfortunately more of a strain. Specifically, my metalogic class. There were problems throughout on many different levels. Let’s just say it was a very stressful, unpredictable mess. My other class was on the Critique of Pure Reason. Coming into the semester I thought I would like this class the least. But, in the end, I really enjoyed reading through the book. It’s a very strange book indeed. What I am most proud of–at least class-wise–is that I don’t have any incompletes. All of my class work for the first year has been completed and turned in.

I was also quite busy travelling to conferences. I ended up going to three (although, in the end, my papers were accepted to seven). I went to Los Angeles in February to present my paper ‘On Maximal Rationality’ at the UCLA/USC Graduate Conference. It was a great experience, and the California weather was amazing. A few weeks later I travelled to Pittsburgh to present (again) ‘On Maximal Rationality’ at the Pitt/CMU Graduate Conference. This was also a lot of fun. Finally, the first weekend of April I went to Austin for the UT Graduate conference. This time I presented ‘A Defense of The Factoring Account of the Having Reasons Relation.’ This was quite the event. I had a blast. I wrote up a recap of the first two here. I wrote up a recap of the UT conference here. ‘On Maximal Rationality’ was also accepted for the Society for Exact Philosophy meeting next week in Laramie, WY. Unfortunately, I had already made plans to go to AZ, and I thus have to miss it. Quite disappointing.

I also wrote a few papers on the side. I will be polishing them up a bit in the coming weeks before starting some new projects. Stay tuned for that.

I am also trying to cut some things from my ever growing reading list. There are several books in the queue for this summer. I would love to have one or two online reading groups again this summer. Stay tuned for a post about that in the next few days.

~ by Errol Lord on May 9, 2008.