Happy (belated) New Year’s Day.
It’s belated because I just got home from a rather long, and slightly eventful flight. I managed to spend the end of the first day of the new year at Boston’s South Station, which seemed somewhat appropriate since I ended so many days last year there too.
I wasn’t meant to be in Boston today, but my flight plans were re-routed while I was airborne between Sydney and LA. The new plan left roughly 50 minutes between landing in LA and taking off for Washington. This seemed to be a surprising, even touching, display of confidence by United Airlines in the efficiency of the immigration officials (vindicated), their baggage handlers (not vindicated), customs officials and security staff (both retrospectively vindicated). I hadn’t got my bags before my plane to Washington took off, though I did make it through the next two steps in about 2 minutes flat. I then managed to get myself re-rerouted to Boston. Where, naturally, my baggage did not end up. I was a little miffed about this at first – especially because while waiting for my bags to not turn up I missed a bus back to Providence. On the other hand, this way the bags will get delivered to my door. (If they arrive.) And on the third hand, the missing bag contains little apart from dirty laundry. Still, maybe not so dirty that I wouldn’t have wanted to wear some of the said clothes tomorrow. But that’s probably autobiography not philosophy.
So why, I hear you ask, New Year’s Day? Well, it dawned on me that the actual calendar years aren’t that relevant to academics. What are more relevant are academic years. So we need years that revolve around those. This underdetermines when we should start and finish years a little, since any time between graduation and the start of Fall would do. So the solstice might work, but I don’t want to think too hard about solstices. (I’ve had 11 winter solstices since my last summer solstice. And I’m not sure that I’ve spelled solstice correctly once here.) As the tax year in Australia goes from July 1 to June 30 for no apparent reason, that seemed a crucial consideration. So around 11.30 last night, I decided July 1 it was, as it had been for most of the past 37 and a half hours.
It being New Year’s then, it’s time for some New Year’s Resolutions. Serious ones, ones that will last at least six days, provided we’re allowed to skip a day here or there, yeah?
- I’ve been finding that reading things other than philosophy is (a) entertaining and (b) useful for writing philosophy. So I should do more of it. The problem is knowing exactly what counts as non-philosophy. Not much when I get started. After all, I wrote two chapters of my dissertation (in philosophy) on the General Theory. But I think we’ll find something.
- Finish my book
Since the book made negative progress last year, this one could be hard, but we’ll try. And it’s such a typical New Year’s Resolution I had to include it. - Stop caring so much about philosophical status reports
It worried me to discover that I could recall the details of the latest Leiter rankings better than I could recall the periodic table. Not that I have any use for the periodic table in my work or anything, but this seems to be the wrong way around. And I’m not going to go learning any chemistry to fix it. - Get and keep to a timetable
I was thinking something like the following:
Wake-10am: Papers blog, read newspapers, eat breakfast, clear overnight mail tray, etc. (At home)
10am-5pm: All work – class preparation, grading, writing, editing, research, etc. (At office)
5pm-7pm: Non-philosophy reading (At home or pub)
7pm-10pm: Dinner and watching baseball (At home or baseball park)
10pm-lights out: Open season (Anywhere)
If I insisted the reading be at a pub I might improve on resolution 1, but only at the cost of the permanent tacit resolution that I won’t drink so much this year. And I’ve have to find a pub in Providence to drink in. And I’d have to allow for exceptions as soon as the timetable became operational. But it might be a way to make sure I get actual work done, as well as fitting in other stuff I want to do. - Stop cheating on my wife
This one is made up. To keep it, I’d have to (a) get married, (b) start an affair and (c) end that affair. And that’s too much activity for one year. Or at least, that would I think count as keeping the resolution. But it’s somewhat odd. It only makes sense if we take the resolution to be bounded by a tacit existential quantifier over times in the upcoming year, which seems reasonable, and if we take the description ‘my wife’ to have narrow scope with respect to the tacit quantifier. The latter is odd. It isn’t, I think, what we do in resolution 2. If I give up on vagueness, and instead write a book on demonstratives, I don’t think I would keep resolution 2, even though there would be a t such that I’d have completed the thing that would have been, at t, my book. I don’t know why the difference here, or whether we should even expect a decent explanation of the difference.
I started making progress on point 1 over the flight here, reading
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith. It was, as the second wave of reviews suggested, as good as the hype indicated. And as always there’s lots of potential philosophical points to make. But it’s getting late so I’ll just make one. The narrator of the story knows a lot more about the world of the story than any particular character. At one point, at least, her knowledge is limited to what is known by some (other) character or other knows, but clearly she would have fairly amazing epistemological powers if she knows all she purports to know. I think I’ve previously endorsed Alex Byrne’s argument that in these cases we should say there is no narrator, at least no narrator in the world of the story. But it’s pretty clear here there is a narrator, for she often will say things that relate more to her (and our relationship with her) than to any character. So she’ll think out loud about what to say next, let us know that some mystery will be cleared up down the road, and occasionally offer commentary on how the characters are going through their trials. All this suggests a narrator, even one in the world of Archie and Samad and Clara and Irie and everyone, but such a narrator would be magical, and we don’t have much of a sense that there’s any magic in this world. (Except in one scene involving a fairly improbable coin toss.) The best explanation of what’s happening here is roughly Kendall Walton’s. The question of how the narrator knows all she knows simply doesn’t arise. If she were to say something wildly inappropriate, then it might arise, but as it stands asking how she knows these things is like asking how Othello gets to be such a good poet. It simply isn’t playing the game the right way to push on those aspects of the make-believe in just that way. This might all require rewriting some of the sections about the phenomenological puzzle in the imaginative resistance paper.