LOOMING LARGELY LUMPY LOADS LOFTED LIGHTLY LEDBETTER HEIGHTS

So, I've bitten off more than I can chew this semester. The average course load for a grad student is two classes, which is full time for a grad student (it is part time for an undergrad). I'm taking four classes, but one of them is Latin. Latin requires a whole lot of study, especially for someone who doesn't have a natural facility for languages, which I don't have. I'm taking that in addition to two grad seminars, one on the Realism/Anti-Realism debate as it relates to philosophy of language, and the other on Plato and Platonism. I'm also taking an upper-division course on the History of Christian thought from the Apostolic Fathers to Augustine.

Part of the reason why this is too much for me this semster has to do with the nature of doing philosophical work. For instance, the first week of class for my phil language seminar, we had to read the entire text of A.J.Ayer's famous Language, Truth, and Logic, before the next class session. Now, on the surface, this is not too much, the book is only about 160 pages. But to do philosophy is not to simply read straight through from the beginning to end, and then talk about it in class. No, reading it straight through is just the beginning. What you have to do is to explicate Ayer's arguments. This is a painstaking process that involves meticulous attention to language usage, conceptual distinctions, and of course, arguments. All this is very time-consuming.

When reading philosophy one seeks to understand the content--an often difficult task-- so as to exposit the material succintly and accurately, to correctly identify and formulate any and all arguments, and provide a useful evaluation of the material, which can involve clarifications, objections, though-experiments and counter-arguments of one's own, and refutations of the writer's arguments. Philosophy is very abstract and it rarely involves narrative, as is typical in history, religion, and sociology. And unlike psychology, you cannot demonstrate rigorous analytical skills nor precision in philosophical explication by means of graphs, statistics, and surveys.

The ability to construct and analyze arguments well is a virtue of good philosophical work. I find philosophical analysis often very draining and exacting due to its technical tools and complex subject matter. Doing good philosophical work requires a strong frame of reference that is grounded in the history of ideas (which includes, but is not limited to, philosophical content). Yet reading and doing philosophy well is more than merely acquiring a certain kind of body of knowledge, it also requires the precision of utilizing a number of conceptual tools and distinctions.

It is doing philosophy well that I keep striving toward. I do it better than some, but not others (this is a triviality). So, we read the material, we then explicate the material, presenting the writer's postion as charitably as possible; we critically analyze the arguments, delimiting the scope of all modal claims, disambiguating any and all equivocal notions, identifying any vagueness, and defining all technical terms, and ultimately determining whether the arguments are sound or cogent. This is often very difficult. Thus, those who study philosophy are always looking for new methods, tools, and skills by which they can improve their expository and analytical skills.

Analyzing a single half page paragraph, say, of Frege, Kant, or Crispin Wright, to name just a few, can take hours. So, when I have to read 160 pages of Ayer's veiws about meaning, analyticity, syntheticity, and metaphysical and evaluative discourse, it takes time. Now add to that the work required for the Plato and Platonism class and one begins to quickly see that my social life is going the way of the Dodo Bird. That class alone requires a minimun of two papers a week, a midterm, a summary presentation, a class presentation, and a final research paper. It's just too damn much to show a good performance. The more reading you get, the lower quality analysis you get because you simply don't have the time to really deeply analyze the texts. The History of Christian Thought has a lighter reading load, but it still is not all that easy to give people like Origen, Clement, Justine, Tertullian, and Augustine, an accurate explication, especially when I'm so bogged down with all the other class readings. But all this is in addition to at least two hours a day of Latin (it actually is more because I have to study paradigms of conjugations and declinations, as well as grammatical constructions, and vocabulary, in addition to the hour or two I have to spend on translating). Then I have to work two days a week at Barnes and Noble. This kills my ability to be a top notch student--I simply cannot focus all my energy into my classes and reseach for my thesis, let alone even think about writing papers for publication and colloquia presentations. I just can't do it, I don't have the money, and hence the time, to do it. Now, add to this friends, family, illness, car problems, and so forth, and you have the makings for a continually stressful time of it. It's no wonder I have the flu right now.

It is not easy being a grad student, at least not a serious one. What were those things I pursue? Chess master title? Excellence in musicianship? Where the hell did those things go? What happened to seeing friends and family? I don't have the money to do such things, which means I don't have the time. I try, but it's very difficult.