Scenes from an afternoon
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 at 08:31PM
My son, Z, asks me
Dad, what is Kantian freedom?
some time later
Dad, what is a conceptual repertoire?
No, he’s not a philosophical prodigy. He was curious about what I was reading, and I explained that I had an essay written by a student, and I had to figure out how good it was. It happened to be an essay about John McDowell’s Mind and World, primarily on animal perception and cognition.
We ended up having a good conversation about whether or not our cat, Erasmus can think (Z thought ‘yes’, and I confessed being to being thoroughly confused on the matter after having read too many McDowell essays).
I’m not a McDowell expert, but I’m the second examiner, brushing up on my knowledge by reading a batch of honours essays. On the whole, they’ve been very good. (Before this week I’d never seen a philosophy essay in the form of an extended interview with Andrew Denton. “So, John, tell us how we can get off the seesaw between the Myth of the Given and the frictionless void…”)
After this, it’s my logic honours essays, and three honours theses. Could be another long evening.
News Archive
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | Happy 2006 – Teaching in Semester 1, 2006 – Assorted crosscultural observations, upon visiting the supermarket – Phase Change – Fun with Playlists: Squeezing your music library onto a 2GB iPod – Degrees of Truth, Degrees of Falsity – Masses of Formal Philosophy – Greg Hjorth coming back to Melbourne – Marathon Effort – Last Night at the MCG – Dame Edna at the Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony – Being a logician means sometimes having to say that you're sorry. Or at least, that you're wrong. – Oh, and there's another paper, too – Spooky coincidence? I think not – AJL Papers – 2006 redesign in progress – Enclosures – The Shifty Salesman – Well, that was easy... – Happy 5 day! – Masses of Formal Philosophy: Question 1 – On the Cable Guy Paradox – On Regret and Slingshots – End of Semester – Interviewed – This football game is pretty tense... – Key Ideas in the theory of proofs #1: The Duality of Proofs and Counterexamples – Teaching in Semester 2, 2006 – Off to France – Here in Nancy, Day 1 – Here in Nancy, Day 2 – Back home – Assorted Observations – Interviewed again – On Politics – On the Interview – Ten Questions about Books – Visits – An idea... – Masses of Formal Philosophy: Question 2 – Party on Tuesday – A Philosophical Poll: on a priori knowledge of possibilities – Horn tooting – Scenes from an afternoon – Off to India... – 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
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About
I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.
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This site is handcoded: I write text in Textmate, and Webby files things in the right place and uploads them to the server. This page was last modified on 2009-01-07 at 09:13AM.
Thought
I haven’t a clue what it is to give a sense to a notion; the notion of giving sense to a notion hasn’t been given a sense, either in this context or, as far as I know, in any other. (I’ve been told that sense are sometimes given to concepts at Oxford after the gates close to visitors; but that may be a leg-pull.)
— Jerry Fodor, in The London Review of Books July 2000.