What I Did With My Semester (pre-semester draft)

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Here’s what I’m doing this semester. (Or at least what I predict I’m doing – we may have to check back in four months to see whether my predictions are mostly correct.) It looks kind of busy at first, but I think (a) it’s a lot less work than most people in the real world have to do, and (b) I can’t imagine it will slow down blogging perceptably, except at the times I’m at these events. (Or in some cases travelling to them.)

Teaching

  • Mathematical Logic: Tuesday and Thursday 9-10.30
  • Time Travel: Tuesday and Thursday 10.30-12

I’m also teaching a continuing ed version of the time travel course for six weeks on Wednesday nights starting late September. (Why? Don’t know. It must have seemed like a good idea once upon a time.)

Attending

  • Kit Fine’s course on abstract objects at Harvard Tuesday 4-6. (Probably attending at this stage.)
  • The semantics reading group in the linguistics dept here, although I don’t know the time for that.

From time to time I guess I’ll sit in on some of the other seminars, especially Jamie Dreier’s course on moral realism Friday afternoons. It looks like that course will be fairly atomistic, so I can jump in from class to class.

Colloquia

  • At Brown: Frank Arntzenius (Sept 15), Tim Crane (Sept 22), Anil Gupta (Oct 20), John Broome (Oct 27, 29, and 30), Ken Walton (Nov 10), Ruth Milikan (Nov 17).
  • At MIT: Michael Smith (Sept 19), Karen Bennett (Oct 3), Keith DeRose (Oct 31), George Bealer (Nov 14), Jason Stanley (Dec 5). (MIT also has some overlap with our colloquium schedule, but I don’t think I’m so much of a philosophy junkie to see the same person at two different depts in two days. Though I did that once last year I guess.)

For various reasons I’ve never got into the habit of going to Harvard colloquia. Unless they update their schedule I guess that won’t change this year.

Conferences
Depending on finances, time, etc., some combination of:

If anyone is driving to any of these from Providence and wants a passenger, let me know. If you know of other conferences that will be fun, especially if they are within driving distance of Providence, really let me know!

Writing
Well who knows in between all that, but I need to (co-)write a paper on epistemic modals very soon, do the final drafts of my papers on truer and on luminosity, and I’d like to finish up the imaginative resistance paper, try writing something semi-informed about the use of the modularity of mind hypothesis in epistemology and do the modal parts/temporal parts comparison that I mentioned this morning.

I also need to write something on applied ethics for the (wonderful) International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Ethics at Baton Rouge. (Note the link is to last year’s program. I couldn’t find a website for this year’s event yet.) And in the medium term I have to write something on intuitions, methodology and zombies that I promised to a conference. But that’s not for a while yet I think.