What I did on my Book Today (2/24/11)
Spent half an hour writing my paper on Unification and Special Science kinds from the day before.
What I did on my Book Today (2/23/11)
Read through articles by Marc Ereshefsky on Kinds (Natural and Otherwise)
- Bridging the Gap between Human Kinds and Biological Kinds (Philosophy of Science, 2002)
- Eliminative Pluralism (Philosophy of Science, 1992)
- What’s Wrong with the New Biological Essentialism (Philosophy of Science, 2010). This has a number of really interesting objections to the HPC account of kinds, objections that I need to respond to and that will help me bring my own account into much sharper focus.
Started to rewrite the introduction to my paper on unification and kinds which I need to get done and sent off soon. The arguments in the paper will be part of the book, so that counts.
Grind
I very badly need to write a book. I also very badly want to write it. But doing it is also hard, in part because it’s such a big undertaking. I cannot see huge chunks of progress in a single day, let alone a single sitting, in the way that I might be able to see huge chunks of progress when writing some other things, even an article. This makes things a bit tricky, because I’ve worked on the inspiration (”just go”) model for a while, and it’s not really suitable for a book. I need to grind this out a bit more, do some work on the book every day. In this respect, I’m no different from other creative types, and in the spirit of this project, I’m going to post what I do on my book every day. (Including nothing when nothing happens.)
Teaching Statements
(This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)
Teaching statements are kind of easy, but they’re hard to feel good about. Mostly, that’s because they’re about how to be a good teacher, or perhaps more specifically, about why you are a good teacher. And explaining what makes someone a good teacher is a lot like trying to teach someone how to teach. If you try to do it in words, you’ll probably end up saying the obvious and obviously inane: “be engaging, be well-prepared, foster an active learning-environment, make room for everybody, etc.” Yeah, that really clears it up!
Abstracts
Let’s turn to dissertation abstracts. (This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)
The dissertation abstract that you produce as part of your job market dossier gives a brief overview of your dissertation, much like an abstract of an article gives a brief overview of the article. But it also does a whole lot more, and I want to mostly focus on that “more.”
Dialogue
October 19th, 2008 in Family | No
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“I love you very much.”
“Why do you love me?”
“Because you’re excellent, sweet, and really wonderful.”
“No, because I’m me!”
DFW
September 15th, 2008 in Uncategorized | No
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I’ve never read any of the huge books that David Foster Wallace. It seemed like a project on a par with life projects—kottke.org has this list of resources for reading Infinite Jest. I am still really sad that he passed. If you want to get a sense of what really good writing is, in any domain, I recommend reading his piece on Roger Federer in the New York Times sports magazine Play.
Insensitive Semantics, Chp. 6
Welcome back! Time to report on our most recent meeting of our reading group, this one concerned with chapter 6. I presented, and my handout is available here.
This Book Changed My Life
August 28th, 2008 in Running | No
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I grew up playing basketball. I played until Zoe was born, and then several things happened that made me stop. For one, I usually played after work, but that has become prime family time. For another, I blew out my knee. I finally got my knee fixed, though that didn’t do anything to remove the scheduling difficulty. So once I started exercising again, I mostly just ran.
Job Market Writing Samples, Part II
I talked about some aspects of writing a job market writing sample here. In that post, I emphasized the ways in which a writing sample is different from a paper aimed at publication. Today, I want to talk about one of the points of correspondence between them.