Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

1. Supervision: 16^th June¹ 2008.
2. Reviewed² "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 February³ and 18^th February⁴ 2008, 3^rd March⁵ and 17^th March⁶ 2008.
3. Wrote reviews of papers prerequisite to my draft chapter⁷ on “What are We?”
   • A Note⁸ on "Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics", sections I:1-3 (reviewed at Supervision⁹).
   • A Note¹⁰ on "Chisholm (Roderick) - Which Physical Thing Am I? An Excerpt from 'Is There a Mind-Body Problem?'" (reviewed at Supervision¹¹).
   • A Note¹² on "Baillie (James) - What Am I?" (reviewed at Supervision¹³).
   • A Note¹⁴ on "Olson (Eric) - What Are We?" (reviewed at two¹⁵ Supervisions¹⁶).
   • A Note¹⁷ on "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - What Am I?" (reviewed at Supervision¹⁸).
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 September¹⁹, 22^nd October²⁰, 12^th November²¹ and 19^th November²² 2007.
2. Essay²³ on "Dennett (Daniel) - Conditions of Personhood" produced and reviewed²⁴.
3. Chapter-outline²⁵ for my thesis drafted, reviewed²⁶ and revised.
4. Web-technology²⁷ paper drafted and reviewed²⁸.
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