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Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Great Novel of Fraternity

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

While visiting Boston College, I found myself one evening in an Indian restaurant, expounding to an audience of two or three whose names I couldn’t remember in the crush of names. I was expounding my belief that A Sentimental Education was a greater novel than Madame Bovary. At the time this was just an opinion, [...]

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Analysis, Feeling, and Happiness: On J.S. Mill

Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Autobiography of J.S. Mill was probably the first philosophical text I encountered. Though the philosophy is a marginal philosophy, a philosophy of practice and of human life spliced in between narrative — like the philosophy of Augustine’s or Rousseau’s Confessions — it is no less intriguing for that. This evening I reread it for [...]

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Justifying the Existence of Philosophy Departments

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The New APPS’s new interview, with Steven Shaviro, has much of interest — the whole series is especially wonderful as a compendium of scholarly practices — but I was struck by another recurring aspect of the series: discussions of the plight of the humanities in the contemporary university. Let’s consider the institutional and professional side [...]

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On Taking Notes

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

I’ve exchanged many forms of note-taking over the last four years of undergraduate education. It is a struggle to find a method that can record one’s thoughts and act as a crutch to one’s memory (to the specific degree one’s memory needs a crutch) without impeding the process of reading and reflecting. I came to [...]

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A Visit to Boston College: Decided

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Over the recent Spring Break I visited Boston College. It’s one of the places I was accepted to the Ph.D. program in philosophy — and after my visit, though I was already leaning in that direction, I definitely decided to attend. I sent off my acceptance form today. Now the only thing I have to [...]

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In Which I Lovingly Receive A New Laptop

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

We decided that I need a better laptop to accompany me to grad school. For the past year, I’ve been using a snazzy little ASUS netbook that my parents bought me. (Thanks!) It works really well, but I’m beginning to seriously resent its wee little screen — to the point that it spends most of [...]

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The Habit of Writing

Friday, March 11, 2011

The day after my two-day contest-writing marathon, I’m surprised how quickly one develops the habit of writing. There are so many books out there about strategies for acquiring this habit. One of the best, for example, is On Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande. If you follow her advice, you are supposedly training yourself to [...]

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