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the city of dreams, part 2
I didn't end up saying what I was planning to say in this post because I had plenty of other things to say first. Here are a few of them.
It's hard to put into words how much I love teaching. It is basically everything I ever dreamed it would be when I first decided, around age 13, that it was what I wanted to do. My Wednesday morning tutorial group for Logic, Language, & Reality is turning out to be a great one -- small, but populated with people who are ready to come in and just start talking, without (much) prompting from me, and also in response to each other's questions rather than waiting for me to answer them. And when I put forth a question, they explore possible answers to it, rather than staring at me dumbly. Because they've read the material and are engaged in it, we end up having really interesting discussions -- last week, we had a 20 minute diversion on the origin and development of the universities in the Middle Ages. This morning, someone asked "But what are Frege's views on numbers?" and so we talked about 1-1 correspondences and equivalence classes, and I told them that if I can get a 3rd year philosophy of math module going, we'd read Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic -- which holds a special place in my heart as the very first piece of contemporary analytic philosophy that I ever read. My Frege/Russell/Wittgenstein class basically revolutionized my philosophical world: I had NO IDEA that philosophy could be conducted this way and on those questions. It was one of the best courses I had as an undergrad -- we'd arrive early to lecture every week and stay late (I was routinely late for my History of Modern Philosophy discussion section, in part because that class was by far the low point of my undergrad philosophical career. It was just SO BORING), and at the end of the semester the professor took us all out for pizza.
There's three people in this group that are doing joint philosophy/math degrees, and I find it astonishing that there is such a degree programme here and NO PHILOSOPHY OF MATH COURSE. (They agree with me, and would really like that to change, so I've told them to start telling staff this.) I think I should be able to do it without too much difficulty: I can adapt my current 3rd year seminar from being modal logic & incompleteness to being incompleteness & foundations of math -- and it would make sense, since clearly it's the phil of math. stuff that the 2nd year course this year is going to be a feeder for, whereas last year it was clearly modal logic. So I hope I can slide this in as a minor change to course content rather than as the development and deployment of a wholly new course, which I doubt would fly.
But it's only a month into the year and I've already got a cohort of motivated and excited students who are interested in the things I am interested in; I can already start putting pretty good bets on who's going to approach me about supervising their theses. That's the ONE thing about last year that really made me feel validated in how I handled the 2nd year course -- the fact that almost as soon as signing up for supervision opened, my list was full, proving that there were people who found the material interesting, stimulating, and worthwhile. (In fact, it is a small matter of smug pride that my list was full before a majority of the others: People knew that there would be competition for a limited number of slots!) I have been so pleased with my supervisees this year so far -- we had a group meeting week before last, and it was great to see both the ideas they have (some of which are really quite serious and substantial, and I have high hopes for) and how interested they were in what others were doing, offering questions and comments even if the topic was far from theirs. I hope to have them all together again once or twice next term, and then perhaps also in Easter term after they've submitted. Maybe we'll go for celebratory drinks. But these are people who care about what they are doing, and what they care about is what I care about, and how on earth could one NOT enjoy this?
It's hard to put into words how much I love teaching. It is basically everything I ever dreamed it would be when I first decided, around age 13, that it was what I wanted to do. My Wednesday morning tutorial group for Logic, Language, & Reality is turning out to be a great one -- small, but populated with people who are ready to come in and just start talking, without (much) prompting from me, and also in response to each other's questions rather than waiting for me to answer them. And when I put forth a question, they explore possible answers to it, rather than staring at me dumbly. Because they've read the material and are engaged in it, we end up having really interesting discussions -- last week, we had a 20 minute diversion on the origin and development of the universities in the Middle Ages. This morning, someone asked "But what are Frege's views on numbers?" and so we talked about 1-1 correspondences and equivalence classes, and I told them that if I can get a 3rd year philosophy of math module going, we'd read Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic -- which holds a special place in my heart as the very first piece of contemporary analytic philosophy that I ever read. My Frege/Russell/Wittgenstein class basically revolutionized my philosophical world: I had NO IDEA that philosophy could be conducted this way and on those questions. It was one of the best courses I had as an undergrad -- we'd arrive early to lecture every week and stay late (I was routinely late for my History of Modern Philosophy discussion section, in part because that class was by far the low point of my undergrad philosophical career. It was just SO BORING), and at the end of the semester the professor took us all out for pizza.
There's three people in this group that are doing joint philosophy/math degrees, and I find it astonishing that there is such a degree programme here and NO PHILOSOPHY OF MATH COURSE. (They agree with me, and would really like that to change, so I've told them to start telling staff this.) I think I should be able to do it without too much difficulty: I can adapt my current 3rd year seminar from being modal logic & incompleteness to being incompleteness & foundations of math -- and it would make sense, since clearly it's the phil of math. stuff that the 2nd year course this year is going to be a feeder for, whereas last year it was clearly modal logic. So I hope I can slide this in as a minor change to course content rather than as the development and deployment of a wholly new course, which I doubt would fly.
But it's only a month into the year and I've already got a cohort of motivated and excited students who are interested in the things I am interested in; I can already start putting pretty good bets on who's going to approach me about supervising their theses. That's the ONE thing about last year that really made me feel validated in how I handled the 2nd year course -- the fact that almost as soon as signing up for supervision opened, my list was full, proving that there were people who found the material interesting, stimulating, and worthwhile. (In fact, it is a small matter of smug pride that my list was full before a majority of the others: People knew that there would be competition for a limited number of slots!) I have been so pleased with my supervisees this year so far -- we had a group meeting week before last, and it was great to see both the ideas they have (some of which are really quite serious and substantial, and I have high hopes for) and how interested they were in what others were doing, offering questions and comments even if the topic was far from theirs. I hope to have them all together again once or twice next term, and then perhaps also in Easter term after they've submitted. Maybe we'll go for celebratory drinks. But these are people who care about what they are doing, and what they care about is what I care about, and how on earth could one NOT enjoy this?
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