Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

1. Write review of "Kurtz (Roxanne) - Introduction to Persistence: What’s the Problem?", the introduction to "Haslanger (Sally) & Kurtz (Roxanne), Eds. - Persistence : Contemporary Readings".
2. Complete the write-up¹ from my final Supervision of 16^th June.
3. Complete listening to "Smith (Steven B.) - Introduction to Political Philosophy".
4. Trawl the Philosophers Index for recently-posted papers on my research topic. This is required urgently as my SHL subscription will no doubt expire shortly.

1. Complete reading and reviewing "Fine (Kit) - The Non-Identity of a Material Thing and Its Matter".
2. Write a paper on Constitution.
3. Complete a full review of "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View".
4. Write a full review of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology".
5. Revise / correct / complete essays in the light of supervisions. Ie:-
   • Note² on "Dennett (Daniel) - Conditions of Personhood".
   • Note³ on "Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics", sections I:1-3.
   • Note⁴ on "Chisholm (Roderick) - Which Physical Thing Am I? An Excerpt from 'Is There a Mind-Body Problem?'".
   • Note⁵ on "Baillie (James) - What Am I?".
   • Note⁶ on "Olson (Eric) - What Are We?".
   • Note⁷ on "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - What Am I?".
   • Note⁸ on "Fine (Kit) - A Counter-Example To Locke's Thesis".
6. Complete a draft chapter⁹ on “What are We?”; sub-tasks as defined in the plan.
7. Continue write-up of "Moreland (J.P.) & Rae (Scott) - Body & Soul - Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics".
8. Continue write-up of "Bynum (Caroline) - Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200 - 1336".
9. Complete reading "Plato, Gallop (David) - Phaedo".
10. Ensure some minimal data on Abstracts for all Identity Papers Read.
11. Transfer marginalia to Notes. I think this is a key step on-going, 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.
12. 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).

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

1. Supervision: 16^th June¹⁰ 2008.
2. Reviewed¹¹ "Fine (Kit) - A Counter-Example To Locke's Thesis", discussed at the above supervision.

1. Detailed term plan (not adhered to).
2. Supervisions: 4^th February¹² and 18^th February¹³ 2008, 3^rd March¹⁴ and 17^th March¹⁵ 2008.
3. Wrote reviews of papers prerequisite to my draft chapter¹⁶ on “What are We?”
   • A Note¹⁷ on "Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics", sections I:1-3 (reviewed at Supervision¹⁸).
   • A Note¹⁹ on "Chisholm (Roderick) - Which Physical Thing Am I? An Excerpt from 'Is There a Mind-Body Problem?'" (reviewed at Supervision²⁰).
   • A Note²¹ on "Baillie (James) - What Am I?" (reviewed at Supervision²²).
   • A Note²³ on "Olson (Eric) - What Are We?" (reviewed at two²⁴ Supervisions²⁵).
   • A Note²⁶ on "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - What Am I?" (reviewed at Supervision²⁷).
4. Commenced reviewing
   • "Fine (Kit) - The Non-Identity of a Material Thing and Its Matter" and
   • "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View".
5. Completed listening to "Kagan (Shelly) - Death: Course introduction".
6. Somewhat irregular attendance at Birkbeck Research Seminars.

1. Supervisions: 28^th September²⁸, 22^nd October²⁹, 12^th November³⁰ and 19^th November³¹ 2007.
2. Essay³² on "Dennett (Daniel) - Conditions of Personhood" produced and reviewed³³.
3. Chapter-outline³⁴ for my thesis drafted, reviewed³⁵ and revised.
4. Web-technology³⁶ paper drafted and reviewed³⁷.
5. Regular attendance at Birkbeck Research Seminars. Some correspondence with fellow students.

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Abstracts for many papers obtained and incorporated into the database.
6. Research proposal produced and used as a prototype for the metaphilosophical model I’ve developed.
7. Application to Birkbeck made and successful.

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1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026