being, dwelling, thinking
I miss Ithaca and familiar faces and rhythym and routine. I wish I'd managed to shrug a semester's worth of tiredness and disappointment.
***
Most of my books are still in boxes, and last semester's deritus is strewn around the living room; not suprisingly, only the kitchen is in order. On Tuesday, my couch is being delivered, and I'll hang up my prints and postcards. Now my only decoration is a photocopy of a Brueghel painting that I hung in the kitchen because it reminds me of T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday". (Lately, Eliot the high church Anglican has replaced Eliot the high modernist in my personal canon.) Hopefully, I'll have my apartment in order before the semester begins on 16 January.
***
I still have a paper to finish before I'm oficially finished with my first semester of grad school. I'm writing on a weird passage in the First Critique (A 701/B 729) that suggests that the systematicity of nature entitles us to presuppose a moral God. I have a rather idiosyncratic view of design arguments and think that they don't establish anything about God's goodness--just His efficiency and skill. There's a lot of textual evidence (especially in the Third Critique esp. 5:357 ff) that Kant doesn't think that skill or efficiency or purposiveness are moral attributes, so the moral properties alluded to at A701/B729 won't (or shouldn't be) the result of Kant taking my limited view of design argument and being comitted to some very expansive view of what counts as moral.
Next semester I won't let myself fall so behind. I will be organized and perspicuous and everything that I'm not now.
***
Most of my books are still in boxes, and last semester's deritus is strewn around the living room; not suprisingly, only the kitchen is in order. On Tuesday, my couch is being delivered, and I'll hang up my prints and postcards. Now my only decoration is a photocopy of a Brueghel painting that I hung in the kitchen because it reminds me of T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday". (Lately, Eliot the high church Anglican has replaced Eliot the high modernist in my personal canon.) Hopefully, I'll have my apartment in order before the semester begins on 16 January.
***
I still have a paper to finish before I'm oficially finished with my first semester of grad school. I'm writing on a weird passage in the First Critique (A 701/B 729) that suggests that the systematicity of nature entitles us to presuppose a moral God. I have a rather idiosyncratic view of design arguments and think that they don't establish anything about God's goodness--just His efficiency and skill. There's a lot of textual evidence (especially in the Third Critique esp. 5:357 ff) that Kant doesn't think that skill or efficiency or purposiveness are moral attributes, so the moral properties alluded to at A701/B729 won't (or shouldn't be) the result of Kant taking my limited view of design argument and being comitted to some very expansive view of what counts as moral.
Next semester I won't let myself fall so behind. I will be organized and perspicuous and everything that I'm not now.