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Status Reports
Status: Personal Identity (2008-December)
(Text as at 06/01/2009 14:06:43)
*** 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. Maybe the most important reason is to get feedback on my outpourings, for which I have been grateful for the forbearance of my former Supervisor (Birkbeck: Jen Hornsby), Prof. Jen Hornsby.
Summary of Progress during December 2008
I’ve decided not to continue with my part-time PhD for the time being, but to re-apply for a full-time place commencing in October 2010. I do intend to continue research in the interim, but I have done very little since deciding to intermit. Indeed, it is time to recognise that my other interests are leaving me with little time or energy for research in this area. So, I simply now intend to keep things ticking over until either my interest perks up, or it is time to reapply for the PhD. As can be seen from the items below, I’m looking at things across quite a broad front.
Quite a lot of things started in November, though nothing much completed, including:-
- Read "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'The Body in Mind' by Mark Rowlands". In December 2008, Mark Rowlands gave a lecture on his new book The Philosopher and the Wolf at the Royal Society of Arts. My daughter Naomi attended, but wasn’t very impressed. Mark took a series of “Small Groups” I attended in my first year at Birkbeck back in 2001. I cannot remember a wolf parked in the corner, but I can remember not being impressed by his philosophy of mind, so I thought I’d have a quick look now I know a bit more philosophy.
- Started taking a look at "Rowlands (Mark) - Connectionism and the Language of Thought", which connects two of my former interests.
- Started reading "Everett (Daniel) - Don't Sleep There are Snakes: Life". This is interesting for several reasons:-
- The author was a missionary who “lost his faith” as a result of his work – I want to find out why.
- The author thinks the language of the Pirahas (the Amazonian tribe he spent 30 years on and off living with and studying their language) is non-recursive, thereby refuting Chomskyan theories of Universal Grammar.
- Exotic cultures provide interesting challenges to western views of personhood.
- Read "Gladwell (Malcolm) - Personality Plus". I’d expected this to be related to my recently purchased "Gladwell (Malcolm) - Outliers: The Story of Success", but it wasn’t. Still, it confirmed my scepticism about the Myers-Briggs test. Wrote a brief synopsis.
- Started reading "Gray (Peter) - Psychology", in particular investigating the accompanying CD. This is the set book from "Bloom (Paul) - Introduction to Psychology". I tried Wundt’s Reaction Times test, but all it showed was the openness of the test to experimental error. My dithering over the first response to the pure reaction test meant that I ended up with negative perception time in the second test.
- Read "Murphy (Nancey) - Do Christians need souls? Theological and Biblical perspectives on human nature", the first chapter of "Murphy (Nancey) - Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?". Murphy rejects dualism on scientific grounds, and thinks the Bible just isn’t interested in such questions, simply assuming the metaphysics of the day. She thinks we can survive resurrection. I look forward to the arguments in "Murphy (Nancey) - What are the philosophical challenges to physicalism? Human distinctiveness, divine action, and personal identity", though they appear to be somewhat brief.
- Read "Robinson (Howard) - Vagueness, Realism, Language and Thought" (the latest Aristotelian Society talk).
- Read half of "Sklar (Lawrence) - Philosophy and Spacetime Physics: Introduction", and purchased "Sklar (Lawrence) - Space, Time and Spacetime", which maybe ought to be read first.
- Read "Towers (Grady M.) - The Outsiders". This was triggered by an item on Philos_List, where Rebecca Roache requested literature on the thesis that being intelligent isn’t always a good thing. Forwarded this offering, but thought I ought to re-read it first. I agree with most of its points, though maybe it’s somewhat self-serving.
Time Divisions (Where, for “YTD” – Year to Date – the year commences in October 2008):
I spent 30 hours in December (84 hours YTD) on my Thesis or Thesis-related work. Of this 17 hours (52 hours YTD), or 55% (61% YTD) were spent on background activities.
The background activities include Book / Paper cataloguing, Aristotelian Society / Philos-List, and General Admin and Status Reporting. This needs to come down, as they are not strictly necessary.
The task lists below are supposed to be adjusted in line with what is realistically achievable. Anything listed as “for immediate progression” is intended to be completed, or at least progressed, in the coming month. Other items that cannot be addressed in this timeframe are relegated to the second list, however intrinsically appealing. Unfortunately, the “immediate” list is getting rather long, and I need to be disciplined and not start anything else until the list is pruned.
Priority Tasks for Immediate Progression
- Write review of "Kurtz (Roxanne) - Introduction to Persistence: What’s the Problem?", the introduction to "Haslanger (Sally) & Kurtz (Roxanne), Eds. - Persistence : Contemporary Readings". I’ve decided to get a firmer view on Persistence before reverting to Animalism, so intend to read this book in its entirety.
- Gain a better understanding of the philosophy of Time by reading:-
- Complete the write-up1 from my final Supervision of 16th June 2008.
- Continue reading through "Gray (Peter) - Psychology".
- Complete reading "Murphy (Nancey) - Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?" & start writing up notes.
- Write a note on "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'The Body in Mind' by Mark Rowlands".
- Complete reading "Rowlands (Mark) - Connectionism and the Language of Thought" and write a note.
- Complete reading "Everett (Daniel) - Don't Sleep There are Snakes: Life" and write a note.
- Complete reading "Sklar (Lawrence) - Philosophy and Spacetime Physics: Introduction" and write a note.
- Start reading "Gladwell (Malcolm) - Outliers: The Story of Success".
- Review my Philosophy Web-pages, which are ill-focused now I’ve quitted Birkbeck.
- Trawl the Philosophers Index for recently-posted papers on my research topic. This seems less urgent than I’d thought, as my SHL on-line subscription does not seem to have expired.
- Ensure some minimal data on Abstracts for all Identity Papers Read – ie. Review papers read to date, and ensure some minimal write-up is available for each.
- Continue cataloguing books filed in the garage. This is tedious, but useful to be reminded of which books I’ve got, and where to find them.
Items Outstanding for Less Urgent Progression
- Complete reading and reviewing "Fine (Kit) - The Non-Identity of a Material Thing and Its Matter".
- Write a paper on Constitution.
- Complete a full review of "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View".
- Write a full review of "Olson (Eric) - What are We? A Study of Personal Ontology".
- Revise / correct / complete essays in the light of supervisions. Ie:-
- Complete a draft chapter9 on “What are We?”; sub-tasks as defined in the plan.
- Continue write-up of "Moreland (J.P.) & Rae (Scott) - Body & Soul - Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics".
- Continue write-up of "Bynum (Caroline) - Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200 - 1336".
- Complete reading "Plato, Gallop (David) - Phaedo".
- 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.
- 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
This isn’t going to change much in the near future, so I’ve hived it off to a separate Note10.
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518 (Status: Personal Identity (2008-December)) |
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