...my first week of the semester. Although it's fantastic to only have classes two days out the week, and begin my weekend on Wednesday night(!), I've nevertheless realized that weekends for me, throughout this semester, will be my busiest time. Compared to last semester, this new one will perhaps be twice as difficult; the demand I feel from the courses just simply wasn't felt as intensely as this semester. That is partly to do with new professors, who seem more rigorous in there courses than last; and also because my courses this semester deal more with broad movements in philosophy rather than individual texts. For example, "Augustine and the Ancients," is, for the first time since the retirement of Dr. Ramirez, taught be an Ancient scholar. So he is dealing mostly with the connection between Ancient philosophy and Augustine's Christian (but nevertheless strongly Platonic) philosophy: its rejection, adoption, and adaptation. We will be covering from the Presocratics to Plato to the Neoplatonists and then Augustine. The course will be excellent, I think, but again very difficult with very much reading.
"Contemporary Neo-Pragmatism" will be the least intense of the three, but despite that, it is entirely new terrain for me. I don't know much about Pragmatism, let alone its contemporary form, but I have been very encouraged in the two meetings so far. I think the course will give me some knowledge of new movements in theories of action to deal more lucidly with the paper I'm now revising (more like rewriting for the third time) on Scheler and Wojtyla. The problem centers essentially around action theories, so this will provide me with some very useful ammunition!
Finally--the Husserl course: "Husserl's Internal Time Consciousness". This will, by far, be the most intense of my three courses. It is an advanced seminar on Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness, which despite some basic knowledge in Husserl, I have not even dealt with before--not even a little bit. The course, no doubt, will prove to be very fruitful for my Husserlian development, but sitting in a course, with only ten people, in a strict seminar (no lecture) format, as the only first year Grad student, can be a BIT intimidating. Perhaps if I pretend to know what I'm talking about...?
Anyway, there is the contents of my next 16 weeks in a nutshell.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment