The Semester Draws to a Close

As I enter the final week of work for this term I find myself breathing an immense sigh of relief.  Though these have been the most challenging  months of my life, I do not look back over them with even the slightest regret.  The relief comes from the absence of personal doubt.  I have survived, and moreover I will have succeeded.  For a person who continually lives in his own head, doubting every movement and decision, this has been a semester of revelation.

I am eager to spend a few days relaxing, but to thereafter get right back to work.  I have a great deal of reading and writing to do for my thesis.  I hope to complete a large part of the first draft over this break.  I will also be training for rowing even harder than I did during term.  One of our coaches has volunteered his time over break to train the few of us that are remaining in town and I simply cannot pass up the opportunity to train with an elite level sculler for three weeks.  At the end of break, just before next term, the team will be coming together and traveling to the famous Dorney Lake, Eton College Rowing Center for an intense training school.  Its time to push my 2k into the 6:30 - 6:40 area and get serious about this quest for rowing greatness.  Next term is Torpids, the epic Oxford bumps racing tournament, and I intend to be in the main boat and get some blades for Hertford.

Next semester I am only taking one tutorial in addition to my thesis writing and Integrated Studies 6 capstone course.  I have already set up the course and its with a Hertford philosophy doctoral student named Hsueh Qu.  We will be studying Hume and some more contemporary philosophers on causation as well as topics in metaphysics and induction.  I am very excited to work with Qu, he is an energetic and brilliant person.  As for my thesis, the topic continues to narrow.  I am now examining the work of three astronomers in particular: Copernicus, Herschel and Hubble.  More on that as it unfolds over break.

And lastly, the Integrated Studies 6 reading list.  I am not kidding when I say that this reading list is one of the main attractions that solidified my commitment to the Shimer curriculum.  Each professor is given a bit of free reign to include a few extra texts outside the core requirements and I am quite pleased with the choices made by professor Patterson.  Without further ado...the sickness that is IS 6:

Texts (in Calendar Order)

Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales                                         

Erasmus, In Praise of Folly                                               

More, Utopia         

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Bacon, The New Organon

Milton, Paradise Lost                                 

Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Voltaire, Candide

Goethe, Faust, Parts 1 and 2

Beethoven, 9th Symphony

Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Barnes, Nightwood

Spiegelman, Maus I and II             

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Welles, Citizen Kane                                             

           

                                                                                   

Reprints (in Calendar Order)

Luther, “On the Freedom of a Christian"

Rabelais, Gargantua 

Montaigne, “On the Cannibals,” “On the Custom of Wearing Clothing,” “On Habit,” and “On the Inconstancy of our Actions”

Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution

Galileo, The Starry Messenger

Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy

Bacon, The New Atlantis

Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

Hegel, Reason in History

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History

Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Weber, “Politics as a Vocation

Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”

Arendt, “Concept of History”

Borges, “The Aleph” and “The Library of Babel”

Incredible.