It is sad how the life of a child suddenly is of the utmost importance only when we no longer take this life for granted!
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Thursday, January 18, 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
The Morning After...
...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.
"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.
Friday, January 5, 2007
Finally, A Day Off
The previous semester has come and gone, with, thankfully, few permanent tragic surprises. I say permanent because I did mistakenly receive an incomplete for one, but it is currently being worked out. I made SURE to Dr. Polansky that those countless hours sitting in front of my computer, flipping hopelessly through the pages of Aristotle's Parva Naturalia, praying that something interesting would come to mind on which I could fill four pages, would not, in the end, go to waste. The papers on the De anima were not as grooling.
And then there was my Magum Opus on Hegel and Ricoeur, for Dr. Rockmore's course, that I will be revising, indeed perhaps hundreds of times, before I submit it for the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics annual conference by June, for the set September date at Villanova University in Philadelphia. I really think I struck something with this paper: implicitly, how the concept of Intentionality is the groundwork for any philosophy of Love. But I have yet to attempt to penetrate Rockmore's impenetrable jargon in the margins of my paper to have a clue as to whether I treated Hegel all that well.
But its finished. And after putting in a massive amount hours keeping PNC Bank's assets secure...hmmm...; some great times with my family--especially my niece and nephew--over Christmas and New Years, even despite the illness, which is now going on a week and a half, I'm about to start another semester. Today is finally a day off with which I hope to take a breather and get some much needed beginning-of-the-year work done on campus. Not too much of a breather in fact, since I will be teaching for part of the Intro to Philosophy course (Basic Philosophical Questions) tomorrow morning.
But times a wastin... Cheers.
And then there was my Magum Opus on Hegel and Ricoeur, for Dr. Rockmore's course, that I will be revising, indeed perhaps hundreds of times, before I submit it for the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics annual conference by June, for the set September date at Villanova University in Philadelphia. I really think I struck something with this paper: implicitly, how the concept of Intentionality is the groundwork for any philosophy of Love. But I have yet to attempt to penetrate Rockmore's impenetrable jargon in the margins of my paper to have a clue as to whether I treated Hegel all that well.
But its finished. And after putting in a massive amount hours keeping PNC Bank's assets secure...hmmm...; some great times with my family--especially my niece and nephew--over Christmas and New Years, even despite the illness, which is now going on a week and a half, I'm about to start another semester. Today is finally a day off with which I hope to take a breather and get some much needed beginning-of-the-year work done on campus. Not too much of a breather in fact, since I will be teaching for part of the Intro to Philosophy course (Basic Philosophical Questions) tomorrow morning.
But times a wastin... Cheers.
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