Long-Term Dream
It's not fun getting over this cold that I have right now, and relations are tense on the home front for the first time in months. One bright spot today, however, was the arrival in the mail from amazon.com of my copies of The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, and John Dewey's Experience and Nature. They had been on my wish list for some time now and were a treat to myself after a larger-than-normal paycheck from Clayton at the middle of the month, and amazon had also conveniently dropped the long-time price on the Peirce from $29.95 to $22.45.
I know that it's probably ridiculous to keep buying philosophy books when I have no place to put them and when it appears increasingly unlikely that I won't be returning to grad school, but it makes me feel good, it gives me a little spot of happiness on days when I need one more than ever before. Moreover, they fill a need in my philosophy library, in the area in which I plan to specialize, should I return to graduate school--but more on that later.
Unfortunately, I haven't read any of my Kant in about a month. Rereading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence after seeing The Seeker has intruded (but has not been unwelcome) on my extracurricular philosophy reading, as have a spate of large projects in my three education classes, some of which involve working on a team with one or more other students. The good news is that I'm now over the hump as far as coursework for the semester is concerned, I'm still holding down a 4.0 in my coursework at Meramec, I am now a member of the Meramec chapters of Phi Theta Kappa (the international honorary society of the two-year college) and the Student Missouri National Education Association (SMNEA), and an easy-going guy whom I worked with at Camp Lewallen in 1998 (and could work with quite well once again, as his Program Director) has just been named the Camp Director at Swift next summer.
To return to the philosophy books: I now know with certainty that, if and when I write a dissertation, it will be on the philosophy of George Santayana, and as such, my area of specialization would be American philosophy. Therefore, it behooves me to fill out my collection of such other thinkers from the "golden age of pragmatism" at Harvard at the turn of the last century as Peirce, Dewey, and William James. My tentative plan is to return to USF for one year only, in order to write and defend a master's thesis, and then to transfer to SIUC, the best graduate department for American philosophy in the country. If I were to study at SIUC, it would have the added benefit of keeping me close to friends and family in St. Louis. While Dr. Anton back at USF would be a more-than-appropriate advisor for a dissertation on Santayana, his age concerns me (he can't be younger than his late 70's), and I'm not even sure that he would be willing to accept such a responsibility at this point in time, much less in a year or two down the road. Indeed, it may sound shallow and alarmist, but his age was my single biggest motivator last spring in pushing to finish the incomplete from my American Philosophy seminar with him from Spring 2004. Anyhow, I think that, as a realistic plan--or perhaps delusionary pipe-dream--finishing up a Ph.D. at Carbondale is inherently achievable. My thesis committee at USF, all of whose members are still there (and which includes Dr. Anton, for his expertise on Neo-Platonism), was organized to supervise my writing on Augustine. This I may still do, and in fact I'd rather write on his philosophy for the master's and Santayana's for the doctorate; I could then list medieval philosophy as an area of competence on my C.V.
That's enough for now. I have some Thera-Flu to swallow and a litter box to clean out.
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at 10/26/2007 10:16:56 PM
