History of Philosophy Roundtable @ UCSD

My attempt to avoid disappearing from the blog as I geared up for the job market was, sadly, unsuccessful. This probably also has something to do with having taken over as the managing editor of the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. At any rate, I have a brief bit of news to post, relevant, principally, to folks in southern California. I am presenting some of my work at the History of Philosophy Roundtable.

This Friday, October 15th, I will be presenting work from chapter 4 of my dissertation. My paper/talk is titled "How to Avoid Mis-Reiding Hume's Maxim of Conceivability", which I am aware contains a painfully awful pun, and for that I apologize.

As I understand it, the format is read-ahead, so, after a short intro, the bulk of the time is just discussion/Q&A on the paper. I am really excited, as this seems like a good opportunity to get valuable feedback on my work.

If I were blogging more, I would almost certainly be blogging about the seminar I am sitting in on that is covering Thomas Reid's "Essays on the Active Powers". I would also be blogging about the reading group a few of us in the department are organizing on a couple of the sorely under-appreciated women philosophers from the (early) modern period. I put "early" in parentheses because one of the figures, Lady Mary Shepherd, was writing in the 1800s, which is a bit late for "early modern", but she has some really interesting discussions of Thomas Reid, George Berkeley, and David Hume, so she fits fairly naturally with study of those figures.