yo
Nothing exciting to write about. Life has been school, and deadlines, and stress. As usual. But on the plus side, one of my deadlines was pushed back by a week. This is a very good thing; now I no longer have two papers due back to back. Another good thing - my insomnia thing finally seems to be gone... I actually got a solid 8 hours of sleep last night. Yay!
David Papineau came to give a couple of talks last week. He was a very cool guy.. very sharp, personable, and interesting. Of course, he's a hard core naturalist (and this after I was just talking about the waning influence of naturalism in analytic philosophy!), and one of his talks was on how the only really interesting philosophical claims are empirical. Ah! And his working example throughout the talk of one of the 'trivial' philosophical issues was the free will problem.. which happens to be one of my pet issues.
What was really funny was that he had lunch with the grad students before the talk, and at lunch I was talking to him about my interest in free will issues, and how I might end up doing my dissertation work on the topic. So during his talk, he kept looking to me and gesturing at me. So of course, I was obligated to defend myself during the Q&A session. And despite my disagreement with almost everything he had to say, it made for good, fun dialogue.
On a side note, click here for a great article by Hilary Bok, against the charges the judges involved in the Schiavo case were 'liberal activists'; rather, she argues, they were just following the laws as they were given.
Oh, and since I'm also a sheep, I'll add this:
If you read this, (even if i don't speak to you often,) you must post a memory of me.
It can be anything you want, it can be good or bad,
just so long as it happened.
[Then post this to your journal to see what people remember about you.]
David Papineau came to give a couple of talks last week. He was a very cool guy.. very sharp, personable, and interesting. Of course, he's a hard core naturalist (and this after I was just talking about the waning influence of naturalism in analytic philosophy!), and one of his talks was on how the only really interesting philosophical claims are empirical. Ah! And his working example throughout the talk of one of the 'trivial' philosophical issues was the free will problem.. which happens to be one of my pet issues.
What was really funny was that he had lunch with the grad students before the talk, and at lunch I was talking to him about my interest in free will issues, and how I might end up doing my dissertation work on the topic. So during his talk, he kept looking to me and gesturing at me. So of course, I was obligated to defend myself during the Q&A session. And despite my disagreement with almost everything he had to say, it made for good, fun dialogue.
On a side note, click here for a great article by Hilary Bok, against the charges the judges involved in the Schiavo case were 'liberal activists'; rather, she argues, they were just following the laws as they were given.
Oh, and since I'm also a sheep, I'll add this:
If you read this, (even if i don't speak to you often,) you must post a memory of me.
It can be anything you want, it can be good or bad,
just so long as it happened.
[Then post this to your journal to see what people remember about you.]