Badgerous, a new philosophy etc blog reports that this thread, on contextualist vs subject-sensitive accounts of knowledge, was actually used in an epistemology class. (Blushes.) The reports suggest that the comments were taken a little more seriously than my rants, but I’m still very chuffed about this. The mission to make TAR considered a major journal takes another step towards fruition.
Here’s a quick summary of my day yesterday.
- Presented lunchtime talk to semantics reading group based on Epistemic Modals in Context, the paper on ‘might’ that Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and I wrote. Preparation time: quite a bit – as you can see from the paper it’s not exactly in ready-to-present form. Number of people present: 4.
- Second class in my philosophy of economics seminar, going over the experimental evidence that people are not utility maximisers. Preparation time: quite a lot – especially catching up on the literature from the last few years because I haven’t looked at that material since I was in grad school. Number of people present: 3.
- Fourth class in intermediate logic course. Preparation time: long enough to print out last year’s notes and read them. Number of people present: about 40 or 50.
What’s interesting is that this seemed like a perfectly rational allocation of preparation resources. It turned out less than perfect, because five minutes into the logic class I decided I didn’t like the direction it was going so changed tack and ad libbed the rest. Fortunately improv logic is a little easier than improv comedy, especially if you’ve taught the course several times before.
And just in case you’re wondering, 40 degrees might look like it’s really warm compared to what we’ve been having lately, but don’t think that makes it rational to wear a sports jacket rather than a winter coat. Brrr.