Following up on Merlin’s post, I thought I’d mention one or two things about the Oxford Philosophy Graduate Conference.

First, I was going to pass along some congratulations for having a paper accepted, but since it isn’t clear that it’s public knowledge which papers have been accepted (i.e. the Oxford site doesn’t say which papers are accepted) it’s not clear that’s information I’m meant to be distributing. I’m always tempted to assume anything I know is thereby public knowledge (am I not a member of the public?) but sometimes I should show more discretion. So this is advance notice of congratulations.

Second, I was rather shocked by this feature of the Oxford conference.

Oxford’s graduate philosophy conferences are unique in that faculty members lead the replies to student papers, thus providing student participants with the opportunity to engage in direct discussion of their papers with leading philosophers.

Well that’s unique all right. I think just thinking about this too hard will lead to nightmares about Tim Williamson or Michael Dummett commenting on one of my grad school quality efforts. It may shock TAR readers, but I wasn’t always the brash self-confident young philosopher you see now. This kind of ‘engagement’ may have been more than my fragile psyche could have handled back in grad school. I hope today’s grad students are mentally tougher than I was.