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Status Reports
Status: Personal Identity (2007-November)
(Text as at 24/12/2007 22:04:48)
*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***
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Rationale for this Project
I am researching the subject of Personal Identity primarily because of its intrinsic interest and importance. It is really a sub-topic in my Philosophy of Religion project. Additionally, I hope to acquire a PhD in Philosophy from Birkbeck at the end of my research (or at least at an appropriate point within it). This PhD is neither an end in itself, nor the usual means to an end; I do not want a job in philosophy at the end of the course. It’s intended to teach me research techniques, provide focus and direction, and furnish a professional qualification should I want to publish any results in this or any other area of philosophy.
Summary of Progress during November 2007
November was my second month back at Birkbeck. There were a couple of positives, but in general I’ve still not got back into the way of serious study. So:
- I’ve had another couple of supervisions (12th November1 and 19th November2 2007).
- The first supervision3 was to review the draft chapter-outline4 for my thesis. This was fairly positive. I’ve updated the outline as a result of the supervision, but have not sought to progress it further. The next step is to write a draft of Chapter-25 – “What Are We?”
- The second supervision6 was to review the defence7 of my interest in Web-technology. This was less positive (not, I think because there was a problem with the paper as such, but basically because my supervisor thinks that the internet may not be a good thing for philosophy, and that this project may be a distraction for me personally).
- I attended three of the four Birkbeck Graduate seminars held in November. The one on "Wegner (Daniel) - Precis and Peer Review of 'The Illusion of Conscious Will'" (which I’d spent a couple of hours reading), though well-delivered and researched, I found objectionable because of (what seemed to me to be) the arrogance of some of the participants – along the lines of “scientists need to attend classes in philosophy before they can do their stuff, so they don’t produce rubbish like this”; also the rejection of psychopathology as a tool for determining how the mind works in healthy human beings. In my view philosophers solve few problems, and make little progress on others, so need to be humble.
- I read or completed reading:For a month’s reading, this is a rather random and miserable collection.
Time Divisions (Where, for “YTD” – Year to Date – the year commences in October 2007):
I spent 97 hours in November (189 hours YTD) on my Thesis or Birkbeck-related work. The minimum requirement for a part time student is 20 hours / week, which would give 86 hours (174 hours YTD). This seems fine. However, of this 39 hours (113 hours YTD), or 40 % (51 % YTD) was spent on background activities. These include Book / Paper cataloguing, Aristotelian Society / Philos-List, Research Seminar preparation and attendance and General Admin and Status Reporting. This needs to come down, as only the Research Seminars are strictly necessary (or fall within the 20-hour / week expectation).
Priority Tasks for Immediate Progression
Items Outstanding for Fairly Immediate Progression
- Revise / correct essay9 on "Dennett (Daniel) - Conditions of Personhood".
- Ensure some minimal data on Abstracts for all Identity Papers Read.
- Transfer marginalia to Notes. I think this is a key next step, and will lead to the proper structuring and interlinking of the Notes by topic. I find myself writing variants of the same thought over and over again. This way, one priceless nugget per topic can be continually refined. Or so I hope. Unfortunately, this approach conflicts somewhat with the “essay-style” approach to philosophy demanded at Birkbeck, which seems to require that one topic be pursued resolutely to a (tentative) conclusion to the (temporary) exclusion of others. This is all very well and focused, but reading a collection of papers to see what they have to say on one sub-topic, and then reading them again and again for others is rather wasteful. I’d prefer to read them once or twice and at that time update the Notes I have on all the sub-topics they address. I’d prefer to leave essays and chapters alone for a year or so until I’ve finished accumulating enough comments on material read from which (any number of) essays can be developed.
- Ensure the categorization by Sub-topic of books and papers is correct. When I started off, I wasn’t clear what categorizations I should have; nor am I yet, quite. The Names of the Sub-topic level Notes and the Sub-topics themselves are supposed to be in line, for the automatic reading-list links to work. Obviously I can make this more flexible (and should do so).
Some Tedious Tasks Outstanding
- Correct data format on Identity Abstracts. Required because of failures in the extraction process from the Philosophers Index. The formatting in PI is often upper case, so I wrote a change-of-case algorithm, which unfortunately de-capitalised proper names in some instances. Also some websites or .pdf documents seem to have embedded carriage returns at the end of lines displayed, which have carried forward on cutting and pasting. And finally, truncation to 255-characters seems to have occurred on occasion.
- Correct author's names - Surname (Forename) - for all papers and books. I was originally rather sloppy on this, and it’s messing up the indexing.
- Complete extraction of abstracts from the Philosopher’s Index and elsewhere. I did a large matching-exercise based on the first 6 characters of the author’s name, together with the article title (but accounting for the annoying occasional full-stops in the PI titles). This picked up 1,500-odd abstracts, but there must be a lot more out there. Of course, I could use PI directly, but it’s slow and not integrated with the rest of my database.
Summary of Progress to Date
… in reverse chronological order, by term.
Year 1, Term 1:
Pre-registration preparation:
- Reading lists researched & papers / books obtained. I seem to have accumulated over 3,000 papers on the subject. Note that while a lot of these are held electronically, I’ve not made my copies available on the web (for copyright reasons).
- I have my collection of 1,400 philosophy books and 11,000 philosophy papers catalogued and the catalogue available on-line. Clearly I will not live long enough to look at more than a small fraction of these.
- Reading commenced. This is a bit of an understatement. My database informs me that I’ve read 407 papers or book-chapters on the subject. Unfortunately, any notes on these exist only as copious marginal annotations.
- Web-based Research infrastructure enabled. I cannot stress enough how important this is. My theory is that we have many conflicting intuitions about Personal Identity (and any other philosophical topic) and our positions in one area affect those elsewhere. So, being able to get one’s hands on all these assumptions and arguments at the click of a mouse is a huge advantage. This is now the way philosophy ought to be done. We don’t discuss philosophical questions any more in the agora, so we don’t write dialogues. We don’t need to communicate by letter, so there’s no need for papers. Of course, there are issues of volume and quality control. I expect to write a paper-generator in due course. But before all this, I’ll need the material to link to. That’s where the real philosophy starts.
- Abstracts for many papers obtained and incorporated into the database.
- Research proposal produced and used as a prototype for the metaphilosophical model I’ve developed.
- Application to Birkbeck made and successful.
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