More Philosophical studies

Villa Casamanza, Nr Perugia, Umbria, Italy

As I write this now, I am into day three of my study period. Still getting up at 6:30 and working in two hour blocks throughout the day. The Cohen summary has gone very well and I have moved onto Martinich's "Philosophical Writing". This is part of the background reading for the dissertation that we have to write as part of the course. Much of the book is taken up with discussions of the logic of arguments or on methods of analysis. But other bits are of more general interest to my study plans at the moment

In particular, his advise of actual essay writing has been very interesting. I am now considering whether a considerable part of my study methodology should be geared towards essay writing. Each course has loads of questions to choose from on each paper. So if I wrote short essays on every question on an exam paper, this would act as a very suitable guide to my studies. And there are, of course, years worth of exam papers to choose from.

I think I have left at home the examples I do have of old exam papers - I would really like to have one to hand now.

I have also been working on a more formally academic paper - John Worrall's piece on Newtonian "deduction from the phenomena". This should prove a more challenging piece to summarize and should also give me a better idea of the sort of standard that I ought to be aiming for with my own dissertation - even though this isn't due until September 2010!

Finally I am trying to decide whether to read a "very short introduction" to Evolution or to Philosophy of Science. The latter rather annoyed me by deciding that inductive reasoning was perfectly reasonable (when it clearly isn't valid) while the former is an area I currently know little about. Maybe I will compromise and read the one on Cosmology instead.