The biggest problem to face was the choice of seminars. There are simply too many on offer here at VT that are amazingly interesting, which probably says something about the breadth of my philosophical interests and the lack of in-depth preference at this point (except perhaps a slight bias toward epistemology and history/philosophy of science, but those are very broad strokes themselves). So, with the DGS's consent, I signed up for four seminars, while the typical course load is three. I then had two weeks to decide which ones to keep and which one to drop. It was a difficult choice.
The original four seminars were about: (1) religion in the public sphere, focusing mostly on arguments for and against religious tolerance, from Locke to Rawls; (2) the epistemology and metaphysics of Locke and Berkeley, and of the pre-Humean modern period in general; (3) the life and work of Charles Darwin, in occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of the Species; (4) and symbolic logic.
Of these, the logic course had to stay, since it's mandatory for all new philosophy MAs. In retrospect, I should have tried to test out of it, since it covers 90% of the material I also studied as an undergraduate... but oh well: this will be a less stressful, more diluted refresher. Also the religion course wasn't in discussion, since it's a one-of-a-kind class with extremely interesting readings and a well-prepared professor (Simon May) that may not come up again while I'm at VT. So it was down to Darwin vs. Locke/Berkeley.
After two weeks of attendance, I've decided to drop Locke/Berkeley. I must confess it was intriguing, and the first week's writing assignment has been a lot of fun. Never before had it taken me ten hours to write a two-page paper, but it was the most original and better-reasoned paper I've written all year, barring my undergrad thesis, of course. As it turned out, Dr. Ott thought it was "very well done!", so chances are I would have done reasonably well in the course. That and the fact that it's the most strongly epistemological of all my choices made me reluctant to let it go. Dr. Ott is fun and a freakin' genius, class discussion was exciting... so nothing really tipped the scale against it.
But something tipped the scale in favor of Darwin. Three nights ago, I lay in bed reading myself to sleep with some of Darwin's field notes from the voyage of the Beagle, a class reading. I fell in love all over again. Some of my fondest memories of college date back to my freshman year, when the glorious Warren Zemke made us read Gould, Mayr, Shermer, Sagan, and of course Darwin himself for a course on history of science and scientific methodology. Those memories came back like a flood, reminding me of why I loved Darwin's lucid thinking, his poetic and yet strikingly accurate observations on geology and zoology, and the beauty of the story of the discovery of natural selection. To have re-read Peter Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea in the first week of class surely helped, too, as that had been among my favorite texts last year for a paper on the same topic.
In short, I chose with my heart and not with my brain. Sure, I can rationalize my choice all I want. I can say that the history of science will still be useful to me as a philosophy grad student, or that the course's instructor Dick Burian is both an awesome guy and a great philosopher (I remember him being cited as an authority on adaptationism in my textbooks, for chrissake), or that I will be able to focus not so much on the history of science and instead write a phil.bio term paper if I want to, or that the course will still count toward the philosophy degree as an elective. These are all good reasons, but they didn't tip the scale. The pleasure of reading about natural history did.
Whether that was a poor choice, time will tell. But for now I am confident it was the correct one, partly because there were no wrong choices, not really: when you work and study next door to such excellent philosophers and talented fellow grad students, you're doing the right thing by definition. So yeah, I might as well be wearing the infamous "I'm really excited to be here!" t-shirt. Phail much? Hmm. We'll see.
Reflections on TA-ing and other stuff coming soon... soon-ish... well, eventually!
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