declaring victory over fall ‘08
On Monday I turned in my last paper, and thus I am finally done with the fall 2008 semester. Here is a recap and some thoughts about it.
I had a lot going on this semester. I took three classes: Al Casullo’s epistemology of philosophy seminar, Mark van Roojen’s ethics core seminar, and Jennifer McKitrick’s seminar on feminism. I also had three hours of thesis hours, which basically turned out to be 6 hours of work. This is because I did a lot of work with my director–MvR–and a lot of work for an independent study I did with Mark Schroeder.
Al’s class was up and down. A lot of the stuff we read was not very good, and it took us a long time to get through a relatively small amount of material. I also was disappointed in my work. We had to do a lot and I don’t think much of my work was very good. I ended up writing two papers–neither of them are very good. Although, writing the first one helped me think a lot about justification in general and perceptual justification in particular (so much so that I now have some papers in the works about the epistemology of perception).
Mark’s class was good. I had read most of the things on the reading list before, but most of the discussions were really interesting. And the take-home midterm was fun to write. It got me thinking about a lot of issues that I had never thought about in any kind of rigorous way before. I also like the paper I wrote.
Jennifer’s class was a mix between Al’s and Mark’s in terms of quality. Most of the readings were really bad. But the discussions were often quite interesting. And although I felt kind of awkward pointing out a ridiculous mistake in a ’seminal’ paper in my paper, it was quite fun to write. It’s always fun to argue against an argument that makes you angry to know exists in print.
I also had three conference trips. The first two were in September. First, I drove up to Madison with Steve Swartzer and Mark Decker for the 5th Annual Madison Metaethics Workshop. This conference was really great. Lots of great philosophers and plenty of good philosophy. I had fun hanging out with Mark Schroeder again, and I met a lot of great people–including, but not limited to, Jamie Dreier, Michael Young, Dave Enoch, Tristram McPherson, Steve Finlay, Russ Shafer-Landau and Matt Bedke. I hope to go to Madison every year from now on.
For the second conference I drove up to St. Paul with Steve, Mark, and Chris McCammon for the Central States. We were all presenting papers. I presented my ‘The Propositional Account of Reasons and Compatibilism about Motivating and Normative Reasons.’ Aside from having a horrible title, I am not that enthused about that paper anymore. I do want to defend the view though. I just don’t like the way I set it up in that paper. Nevertheless, I got some great comments from Tristram McPherson. We also had a good time at a local brewery, the name of which escapes me (ask Steve).
The big trip of the semester was to Oxford for the Oxford Graduate Philosophy Conference. Aidan was one of the other speakers, which turned out to be great! It was really nice to have a friend there–especially since there were three groups of presenters from the same school (one group from Michigan, one from Cambridge, and one from Oxford). I presented my ‘Two Puzzles about Ought.’ I was really lucky to have John Broome commenting. His comments were very good. I also got to spend some time with Jonathan Dancy (mostly thanks to Aidan). That was also fun. All in all, it was a great trip.
Those were the main philosophical things in the fall ‘08. Hopefully I’ll have some exciting news to announce in the next few weeks…
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